Microfluidics for multiplexing of core needle biopsies

Minimally invasive biopsies are increasingly used to obtain tissue for diagnostic purposes. The small size of these specimens can limit mutiplexed (e.g., cytologic and molecular) diagnosis as the sample is often exhausted during a single stage of analyss, e.g., cytologic analysis, which precludes subsequent molecular testing. In this presentaion we introduce a novel mocrofluidics-on-a-slide approach that combines the concepts of cytology, microfluidics and magnetophoresis to enable multiplexing of diagnostic cells. This approach emphasizes cytology for diagnostic purposes and allows recovery of the same intact cells for downstream molecular studies. In contrast to traditional approaches that sequentially partition tissue for different studies, the proposed process allows for the interrogation of diagnostic cells by different modalities, thereby enabling extraction of a maximal amount of informative data from the cells.