Development of new strategies for diagnosing and monitoring cancer in its early stages are key steps towards more efficient anticancer therapies. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs), malignant cells that break away from primary metastatic lesions, have been proposed as “liquid biopsies”, able to provide real-time information about a patient’s disease status. Improvements in technologies for the screening and collection of CTCs can enable a broad range of clinical applications, including early detection of disease and discovery of new biomarkers to predict treatment responses and disease progression. We are developing and applying a microfluidic platform integrated with nanostructured branched plasmonic interfaces to enable selective capture and recollection of CTCs. Gold nanostars are grown in situ on the interior walls of a glass capillary using a fast and scalable synthetic protocol and are chemically modified with specific antibodies to enable the selective capture of Ewing Sarcoma cells. These nanostructures are characterized by strong plasmonic responses in the near infrared and nanometer tip curvatures that enable efficient photon-to-heat conversion through plasmon-phonon coupling (Figure A and B). This localized hyperthermia effect has been applied for the controlled “soft” detachment of adherent cells, and coupled to our platform and will enable the concentration and collection of captured CTCs for further analysis (Figure C). We aim to develop devices capable of high-throughput detection and isolation of CTCs, enabling early sensing of cells with metastatic potential for monitoring disease.

Gold nanospikes enable capture and release of circulating tumor cells

256th National Meeting (2018)

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