Achievement

Colin Paul has been working with Dr. Konstantopoulos, Dr. Drazer, and Jorge Bernate (one of Dr. Drazer’s graduate students) on a project that aims to continuously isolate and separate circulating tumor cells from the blood. They have preliminary results showing that different cell types in the blood (for example, red blood cells, white blood cells, etc.) move at different angles over a surface with raised rectangular features that are oriented at an angle to the direction of flow. Therefore, the device can be used to fractionate blood. The hope is to continue developing this interdisciplinary project, which combines cancer diagnosis and microfluidics, to remove red and white blood cells from the blood to collect only circulating tumor cells. This would allow study of native circulating tumor cells that is not biased by an antibody-based selection method.