Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting | Riga 2026

Active and Responsive Soft Matter: From Biological to Engineered Systems

Poster Abstracts

14-POS Board 14 ELECTROFLUIDIC DEVICES TO ISOLATE CANCER CELLS BASED ON THEIR WHOLE CELL STIFFNESS Gautam V. Soni 1 ; Arkabrata Mishra 1 ; Sweta Srivastava 2 ; 1 Raman Research Institute, Soft Condensed Matter, Bangalore, India 2 St. Johns Hospital, Bangalore, India Cancer metastasis is the primary cause of death worldwide and remains one of the prevailing challenges in curing cancer. Cells that are separated from the primary tumour and travel through the bloodstream are called circulating tumour cells (CTCs). Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) are explored for early cancer detection due to their release during the initial dissemination of tumours, often before clinical symptoms or imaging can detect tumours. CTCs vary widely in size; they can be bigger or similar in diameter to blood cells. Stiffness of CTCs also varies widely and depends on cell type. We are working on the detection of CTCs using a label-free electrofluidic device. The geometry and dimensions of our device is fine-tuned such that it can simultaneously probe the size and stiffness of cancer cells in a high-throughput manner (~1000 cells/min for a single channel). We obtain information about size from the current drop during cell translocation and stiffness from the translocation time through the sensing region of the device. By probing two physical parameters simultaneously, we can give ourselves better detection results than previous methods. We aim to establish an efficient detection and isolation method for CTCs from blood. First, we are establishing the method using cultured cancer cells mixed with blood cells, and then we will move to patient samples.

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