Cell group

The Cellular/Biomedical/Clinical application Subgroup works mainly on development of novel microfluidic/biomems devices/setup for cellular and biological studies and clinical applications including rare cancer cell separation/on-chip detection/in-situ culture/purification, molecular/genetic analysis, drug screening, AI-assisted automatic cell clarification/analysis, etc. The members consist of Yaoping Liu (Ph.D., leader), Tingyu Li (Ph.D. candidate), Tingting Hun (Ph.D. student), Wenbo Zhou (Ph.D. student), Qingmei Xu (Ph.D. student), Yinghao He (Master student), Zheng Liu (Master student), Xinyue Deng (Undergraduate, PKU medical school) and Mu’en Li (Undergraduate). By now, they have achieved:

(1) Successful preparation of a PERFECT filter (Precise, Efficient, Rapid, Flexible, Easy-to-operate, Controllable and Thin filter). They developed an ultra-high-throughput liquid biopsy technique based on the PERFECT filter for sensitive diagnosis of early cancer. The achieved throughput (>17 mL/min for undiluted whole blood and >110 mL/min for aqueous sample) is the world record in the field of liquid biopsy. This technique has demonstrated outstanding performance in rare (as low as 1) cell separation from large-volume (>10 mL) samples including undiluted whole blood, unprocessed broncho alveolar lavage fluid (BALF), urine, pleural fluid, etc. They have demonstrated its promising applications in high-yield protein/cell patterning and high-throughput liquid biopsy of cancer cell separation/detection/culture from clinical sample for early cancer diagnostics and drug screening.

The invention “A Flexible 2.5D Filter for Sensitive and Non-invasive Cancer Detection” was awarded the Special Gold Medal in the 46th International Exhibition of Inventions, Geneva, 2018, the Best Innovation Award of In-vitro Diagnosis Technology (2018), the Silver award in Beijing invention competition (2019), the First Prize of the 5th student competition in the micro&nano technology innovation and industrialization of scientific research achievements transformation (2018) and the First Prize of the 1st translational medicine competition in Peking University First Hospital (2018).

The PERFECT filter has been worldwide applied in more than 50 organizations including universities, institutes, hospitals and companies, including MIT, Tsinghua University, Merck (Germany), MDimmune (Seoul, Korea), Anticancer (Beijing, China), etc. for various applications.

(2)

microfluidic chips for high-throughput cell pairing/fusion.

(3) Modified PDMS (Parylene C caulked PDMS, pcPDMS) for low-permeability of small molecules and anti-fouling of protein application.