Title: Optimizing dielectrophoresis for circulating tumor cells analysis: influence of suspending medium

Biography:

Dr. Marius Olariu defended his PhD thesis in electrical engineering and is currently associate professor within Technical University of Iasi. His scientific expertise is encompassing materials with functional role in electrical engineering, space charge, dielectrophoresis and broadband dielectric spectroscopy. 

Abstract

Development of new tools for evaluation of metastasis evolution based on separation of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) it is not a new approach and a plethora of studies were reported previously. However, differentiation and confirmation of CTCs from normal cells based on different methods than the immuno-staining ones represents a new goal critical in practical experimentations. Thus, identifying the correlation between the morphology of the CTCs and their electrical properties demonstrated to be a viable alternative solution. Moreover, the experiments performed to date demonstrated that characterization of cancer cells based on their electrical properties obtained with broadband dielectric spectroscopy (BDS) is significantly influenced by the properties of the suspending media.

Using THP-1 cells (human monocytic cell line derived from an acute monocytic leukemia patient) as a model, three sucrose based suspending solutions were tested in DEP and DRS experiments. The measured characteristics highlighted how the suspending medium (buffered/ unbuffered) and its conductivity are influencing cells behaviour in the presence of electrical fields. The results confirmed that LCBs (low conductivity buffers) are the most convenient solutions for running these type of experiments as they have a minimal influence on cancer cell viability as well as on basically experimental operability (e.g. parasitic contribution of electrode polarization on Maxwell-Wagner/interfacial polarization).