Design and Analysis of Microchannel for Plasma Separation from Blood

Microchannel device is important and having great use in field of biological research. The micro channels having some advantages like reduction in the sample processing time, consumption of costly reagents and sample volumes. The current work for microchannel is based on the Zwiefach- fung bifurcation law which used to study for separation process. The microchannel based plasma separation is far better and rapid than conventional plasma separation techniques like centrifugation, filtration. Microchannel flow simulation is carried out using CFD software. The analysis is done for different type channel with combination of various sets of different shape and size of obstacles placed along the channel walls. For this analysis we used computational fluid dynamic tool known as COMSOL MULTIPHYSICS 5.0, to study different configurations on pressure and velocity drop. Also, the effect of geometry, cross sectional area are studied. While analysis different obstacles placed along the channel like rectangular, semicircle and triangular are used. The analysis is done for each shape obstacle and observation are recorded while analysis it is observed of that pressure is decreases with increase in number of obstacles.

Rapid and Label-Free Isolation of Tumour Cells from the Urine of Patients with Localised Prostate Cancer Using Inertial Microfluidics

During the last decade, isolation of circulating tumour cells via blood liquid biopsy of prostate cancer (PCa) has attracted significant attention as an alternative, or substitute, to conventional diagnostic tests. However, it was previously determined that localised forms of PCa shed a small number of cancer cells into the bloodstream, and a large volume of blood is required just for a single test, which is impractical. To address this issue, urine has been used as an alternative to blood for liquid biopsy as a truly non-invasive, patient-friendly test. To this end, we developed a spiral microfluidic chip capable of isolating PCa cells from the urine of PCa patients. Potential clinical utility of the chip was demonstrated using anti-Glypican-1 (GPC-1) antibody as a model of the primary antibody in immunofluorescent assay for identification and detection of the collected tumour cells. The microchannel device was first evaluated using DU-145 cells in a diluted Dulbecco’s phosphate-buffered saline sample, where it demonstrated >85 (±6) % efficiency. The microchannel proved to be functional in at least 79% of cases for capturing GPC1+ putative tumour cells from the urine of patients with localised PCa. More importantly, a correlation was found between the amount of the captured GPC1+ cells and crucial diagnostic and prognostic parameter of localised PCa—Gleason score. Thus, the technique demonstrated promise for further assessment of its diagnostic value in PCa detection, diagnosis, and prognosis.