The day may soon arrive when metastatic cancer can be diagnosed quickly and easily by placing a small amount of blood on a kit.

Professor Sang-Kwon Lee (Department of Semiconductor Science and Technology) and a research team composed of graduate students (Dong-joo Kim, PhD candidate; Jin‑kyung Seol, Master’s candidate; Gil‑seong Kim, PhD; Jung‑hwan Hyung, PhD candidate; and Seung‑yong Lee, PhD) have achieved an important research result toward developing an inexpensive diagnostic chip capable of determining cancer metastasis from a very small amount of blood.

Professor Lee's team announced that they developed a cell separation chip that can isolate immune cells with high efficiency using a transparent quartz nanopillar structure.

The team's paper featured on the cover of Nanoscale

This study, a technology for developing a diagnostic chip that can determine cancer metastasis from a very small amount of blood at low cost, was published in the April online edition of the international nano-related journal Nanaoscale (impact factor 4.1). The research was recognized for its excellence and was selected as a cover article for the print issue.

The present results address weaknesses in Professor Lee's earlier work, in which he first developed an inexpensive immune cell separation chip using silicon nanowires in 2010.

The quartz nanopillar cell separation chip developed in this study selectively isolates a specific immune cell, the disease- and immunologically important CD4 T cell, after extracting immune cells from the spleens of mice. The team achieved a cell separation rate more than 95% higher than the results reported in 2010, representing a fourfold improvement over using a standard glass substrate.

In this study, the researchers used a quartz nanopillar structure that is more transparent and allows for more precise fabrication than conventional silicon nanowires. Notably, they fabricated fine patterns on the immune cell separation chip using semiconductor processes and added a hemocytometer function so that immune cell counts can be simultaneously verified.

They also developed a separation chip more than three times larger than the chip developed in 2010 using nanowires (from 0.7 x 0.7 cm2 to 2.5 x 2.5 cm2), enabling various studies on the size, differentiation, migration, and culture of separated cells. This advancement has also been recognized for its excellence.

In particular, the team is conducting parallel research to develop a "metastatic cancer diagnostic chip" that, by early isolation of circulating tumor cells and circulating stem cells—which are present in very small quantities (1–10 cells/mL) in patient blood—would enable diagnosis of metastasis via blood within one hour. This work is expected to make a major contribution to inexpensive, easy diagnosis of cancer metastasis using only a small amount of blood.

Meanwhile, this research was carried out through a collaborative study between Professor Sang‑Kwon Lee's team, the Biomimetic Research Team at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials, and Professor Rong Fan of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, where Professor Lee is currently on research leave.