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. 2022 Jun 13;13:3385. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-31009-9

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© The Author(s) 2022

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 Schematic illustration of the Cluster-Wells’ working principle. While single cells pass unimpeded, the Cluster-Wells captures CTC clusters owing to their multicellular morphology from blood samples of cancer patients, independent of cancer type and their molecular character. b A photo of the Cluster-Wells manufactured in the form of a 47 mm-diameter membrane to be used in commercial filter holder. Close-up image (inset) shows individual wells designed to capture CTC clusters. (Right) Scanning electron micrograph of a blood-spiked LNCaP cluster as captured by one of the wells on the device (see “Methods”: SEM sample preparation and imaging). Scale bar, 20 μm. c Schematic illustration of the fabrication process developed to mold polymer Cluster-Wells device. Steps shown in the figure exclude the fabrication process for the silicon mold and the construction of reusable PDMS mold, which can be found in Supplementary Figs. 2 and 3. Scanning electron micrographs of the PDMS structure employed for micromolding (lower right) and the finished device fabricated out of photocurable polymer, MD700 (lower left). Scale bars, 50 μm.