Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, US, have successfully redesigned the CTC chip to make it more effective at capturing circulating tumour cells (CTCs).
The new HB chip uses a chamber lined with a herringbone pattern of grooves to capture CTCs.
The device captured more than 90% of the tumour cells present in the blood sample during testing, which represents a 25% improvement over the CTC chip.
According to the researchers, the new device can also provide information from the captured tumour cells which is useful for clinical decision making, and is also easier to manufacture.
Study author Daniel Haber said that the new technology is a powerful platform that will enable increasingly sophisticated analyses of metastasis and support clinical research in targeted cancer therapies.
