Credit: Source: Murat Karabacak, Harvard Medical School. Adapted from Science Translational Medicine, April 2013.
The microfluidic CTC-iChip system first sorts the various cells in a blood sample by size, allowing only CTCs and white blood cells to enter the inertial focusing chamber, which lines up those cells into a single file. A magnetic field then deflects cells previously labeled with tiny magnetic beads, isolating CTCs for further study.