Significance: Cell separation is a fundamental process in biomedicine, but is presently complicated, cumbersome, and expensive. We present a technique that can sort cells at a rate equivalent to or faster than gold-standard techniques such as fluorescence- and magnetic-activated cell sorting, but can do it label-free and with very low cell loss. The system uses dielectrophoresis to sort cells electrostatically, using an electrode chip that eschews microfabrication in favor of a laminate drilled with 397 electrode-bearing wells. This high level of parallelization makes the system immune to the bubbles that limit labs-on-chip, while also increasing capacity and throughput to levels comparable with high-throughput FACS and MACS, whereas the chip is cheap enough to be disposable, preventing interseparation contamination.
1 June 1997 in Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering