Abnova's System Products

Abnova’s Captor™ is a label-free, microfiltration system for isolation, enumeration, and retrieval of circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Circulating tumor cells are cancer cells that have detached from the main tumor before entering the bloodstream. They represent an important transition in cancer transformation and metastasis, and portend significant clinical impact in diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and monitoring. Current isolation methods of circulating tumor cells rely on more complicated and harsher techniques and use of general surface biomarkers to capture the CTCs. This results in biochemical alterations and damages to the CTCs rendering them unsuitable for downstream protein and gene analysis and cell culture.

Captor™ system utilizes a proprietary Clear Cell™ CTChip® technology based on sophisticated fluid dynamics and myriads of crescent-shaped microwells to ensure capturing of CTCs while leaving other whole blood constituents to flow through. Although CTCs and larger white blood cells are of comparable sizes, CTCs are stiffer, less deformable, and effectively trapped within the microwells. This elegant and simplistic design maximizes CTCs isolation efficiency, purity, and function by preserving CTCs surface integrity, allowing retrieval of the viable cells in their native state.

Captor™ has a built-in real time imaging system for viewing and digitizing the images during the isolation process. CTChip® allows for cell enumeration by counting the numbers of CTCs which have been isolated in the chip. The entire CTChip® can also be transferred to a fluorescent microscope for immunofluorescence and FISH probe staining for examination and characterization of tumor cells. Cells retrieved using the CTChip® have been shown to be similar to their normal cultures in terms of proliferation rate and morphology, supporting that CTCs are not altered and remain viable.