Determining the Acoustic Mobility of Breast Cancer Cells

Sammanfattning: Breast cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer detected in women. Its heterogeneity and large mutational landscape requires treatment strategies which varies between patients. Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a particularly aggressive subtype which 12-17 \% of breast cancer patient develop. It has no specific treatment and patients with TNBC generally has worse outcomes. To gain more knowledge about the disease, it is important to be able to isolate these cancer cells for down-stream analysis. We have used the novel microfluidic technique, acoustophoresis, as a method to separate the breast cancer cells. The samples that were used were frozen breast cancer tissue samples where cell suspension was obtained through cell dissociation and breast cancer cell lines MCF7, BT20 and BT549. The acoustic properties of the cancer cells suspended in PBS and PBS/Histopaque mixture were measured to design an optimised buffer solution which was then used for an attempt to improve separation. The patient samples turned out to be compromised when they were frozen down and therefore, viable cells could not be obtained. From the results of measuring the acoustic properties, PBS was the most optimum buffer out of the media which were tried, however, it was still not suitable for a good separation of the different cancer cells. In future studies, a larger range of density media should be tested to find a more suitable buffer media.