Microfluidic platform combining droplets and magnetic tweezers: application to HER2 expression in cancer diagnosis

• DOI: 10.1038/srep25540
• Publication Date: 2016-05-09T09:25:29Z
• Authors: Davide Ferraro; Jérôme Champ; Bruno Teste; Marco Serra; Laurent Malaquin; Jean-Louis Viovy; Patricia de Cremoux; Stephanie Descroix
• Keywords: Tweezers; Expression (computer science); Magnetic tweezers

Abstract The development of precision medicine, together with the multiplication targeted therapies and associated molecular biomarkers, call for major progress in genetic analysis methods, allowing increased multiplexing implementation more complex decision trees, without cost increase or loss robustness. We present a platform combining droplet microfluidics magnetic tweezers, performing RNA purification, reverse transcription amplification fully automated programmable way, droplets 250nL directly sampled from microtiter-plate. This decreases sample consumption about 100 fold as compared to current robotized platforms it reduces human manipulations contamination risk. platform’s performance was first evaluated on cell lines, showing robust operation quantities corresponding less than one then clinically validated cohort 21 breast cancer samples, determination their HER2 expression status, blind comparison an established routine clinical analysis.