| dc.description.abstract | Clinical applications of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) as a cancer biomarker are considered as a useful index to provide valuable information, such as cancer detection, prognosis prediction, cancer drugs screening and monitoring the outcomes of systemic treatments. In recent decades, more and more studies developed reliable devices capturing and releasing CTCs from the blood of the cancer patients based on the physical and biological property of CTCs. However, the extremely rare CTCs still limited the development of precision medicine. Herein, the aim of the thesis is to develop a hemofiltration device by using silica microspheres packed in the column to collect a large number of CTCs from the blood. The silica microspheres were modified with sulfobetaine silane (SBSi) to endow anti-clotting property. The size of pores between microspheres was selected to selectively restrain CTCs which are larger than blood cells. In this study, we confirmed the antifouling of the red blood cells (RBCs) by UV-Vis, and examined various variables of column filtration, including the size of microspheres, flow rate, height of filter bed, column cross-section area, and elution times for observe the change of human colorectal cancer cells (HCT116) removal rate and blood cells retention rate, then designed the optimal condition to attain 90% removal rate with 5×105 HCT116 and low blood cells retention rate. The collected cancer cells were then harvested from the microspheres by using a cell density separation solution, and the cells recovery rate also had be investigated. Moreover, the cell viability had also be proven not affected by the flow rate we use. Finally, we demo 2000 mL blood with cancer cell flow through the hemofiltration device and successful recover the alive cancer cells. The experimental results showed that the hemofiltration device has the ability to collect mass cancer cells from the blood, and then the collected cells can be harvested and cultured in vitro. The potential of hemofiltration device in clinical application is expected to solve the problem that CTCs are extremely rare for development of precision medicine. | en_US |