Cell sorting is critical for many applications ranging from stem cell research to cancer therapy. Isolation and fractionation of cells using microfluidic platforms have been flourishing areas of development in recent years. The need for efficient and high-throughput cell enrichment, which is an essential preparatory step in many chemical and biological assays, has led to the recent development of numerous microscale separation techniques. Size-based passive particle filtration using inertial microfluidics have recently received great attention as a promising approach for particle focusing, filtration and fractionation due to its robustness and high rates of operation. The main advantage of inertial-based microfluidics approaches is that continues-flow separation without clogging can be realized using relatively large microchannels with relatively high resolution. In this seminar, I will describe our recent efforts in development of ultra-high throughput microfluidics systems for separation of rare cells (e.g., circulating tumour cells (CTCs) and fetal cells) from blood. Further, I will show that how inertial microfluidics enables efficient sorting of Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) as a function of cell diameter, and show that this enables selection and sorting of osteoprogenitor cells from marrow for applications such as bone regeneration. Finally, I will present some of our efforts for development of stationery droplet-based microfluidic devices to isolate hundreds of individual cancer cells in single-cell chambers for high resolution microscopy.

Corresponding Author’s E-mail: m.warkiani@unsw.edu.au