Microfluidic Systems for Fast and Accurate Diagnosis of Ovarian Cancers

Fast and accurate diagnosis of cancer is challenging. Aptamers may serve as promising artificial antibodies for cancer diagnosis. However, in order to screen highly specific and high-affinity aptamers targeting specific cancer, it requires a series of complex and lengthy procedures. Furthermore, the screened aptamers may require further optimization for recognizing biomarkers associate with cancer. Moreover, further clinical applications for cancer diagnosis such as immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining is a labor-intensive, time-consuming procedure which requires well-trained personnel for carrying out the tedious process. In this work, we reported our recent progress on utilizing integrated microfluidic systems to tackle the above issues. Customized flow and temperature control modules have been established to carry out a fast and automated continuous aptamer screening process on a microfluidic chip for screening ovarian cancer (OvCa) specific aptamers targeting plasma membranes of tissues. Another integrated microfluidic platform was also developed for performing the whole process of IHC staining including the sample pretreatment of tissue samples. With these approaches, aptamers may be used for recognizing and detecting clinical tissue samples for OvCa.