Research  ■

Intelligent microfluidic cancer cell sorter (IMC)

Rapid profiling of intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) for resistant and metastatic cancer cell sorting enables the identification of biomarkers and pre-existing resistant clones that drive therapeutic challenges and metastatic invasion. Isolating innate resistant or metastatic cancer cells from a tumor mass is critical for predicting treatment efficacy and optimizing combinational drug strategies to maximize therapeutic outcomes. However, current systematic and scalable approaches for phenotypically sorting individual cells or clonal populations exhibiting resistance or metastatic traits within a tumor mass remain highly limited. In this project, we developed a novel intelligent microfluidic cancer cell sorter (IMC) incorporating hydrogel technology for high-throughput single-cell phenotype analysis and sorting. This platform enables the isolation of rare, critical cancer cells from a tumor mass, which are then expanded and comprehensively analyzed for functional heterogeneity to identify potential therapeutic targets. Successful implementation of this project will validate sequence-informed hypotheses on key mediators of drug resistance and tumor metastasis, guiding the development of optimized treatment regimens for precision medicine.