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. 2020 Mar 23;6:20. doi: 10.1038/s41378-020-0131-9

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — a Scientific illustration of the developed platform. b A micrograph of the experimental set-up associated with the capture of CTCs from prostate cancer patients’ whole-blood samples. During the capture experiments, reversible physical PDMS-to-glass bonding was firm to prevent leakage of the blood. c The microfluidic device (top panel) is comprised of two reversibly (physically) bonded parts: a PDMS channel (16 total) integrated with HB elements and a glass substrate functionalized with capture antibodies (green Y shapes). Once captured, antigen-specific immunomarkers were used for the identification and enumeration of CTCs. The AFM tip engaging with a single captured intact prostate CTC is shown in the cartoon of the bottom panel, and measurements were performed after peeling off the PDMS chip from the glass slide. Schematics are not to scale. d A micrograph of the PDMS chip shows the geometry, periodicity, and size of the HB elements. e The simulated flow profile within the channel indicates a high degree of mixing at a 20 μL/min flow rate due to microvortices generated by the staggered HB elements. The green arrow shows the direction of the flow. The bottom panel shows 3D velocity streamlines, which indicates efficient mixing within the channel. f The estimated shear stress profile within the channel is shown. g The stacked time-lapse image of fluorescently labeled PC3 cells (bright green) spiked into blood visually confirms the simulated flow patterns