(427c) Label-Free Magnetic Additive Biomanufacturing Technologies to Isolate and Sort Circulating Tumor Cells and Microemboli

Micro- and nano-scale technologies can have a significant impact on medicine and biology in the areas of cell

manipulation, diagnostics and monitoring. At the convergence of these new technologies and biology, we research

for enabling solutions to the real world problems at the clinic. Emerging nano-scale and microfluidic technologies

integrated with biology offer innovative possibilities for creating intelligent, mobile medical lab-chip devices that

could transform diagnostics and monitoring, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. In this talk, we will

present an overview of our laboratory's work in these areas focussed on applications in magnetic levitation

methods for assembling cells and label free sorting of rare cells from whole blood. Cells consist of micro- and

nano-scale components and materials that contribute to their fundamental magnetic and density signatures.

Previous studies have claimed that magnetic levitation can only be used to measure density signatures of nonliving

materials. Here, we demonstrate that both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can be levitated and that each cell has a

unique levitation profile. Furthermore, our levitation platform uniquely enables ultrasensitive density

measurements, imaging, and profiling of cells in real-time at single-cell resolution. This method has broad

applications, such as the label-free identification and sorting of CTCs and CTM with broad applications in drug

screening in personalized medicine.