5. Spiral Inertial Microfluidics for Cell Separation and Biomedical Applications

The emergence of omics studies and single cell analysis in biomedicine has advocated a critical need to develop novel cell sorting technologies to process complex and heterogenous biological samples prior analysis. Spiral inertial microfluidics is an enabling membrane-free cell separation technique developed almost a decade ago for high-throughput biophysical cell separation, and has since been widely exploited for different biomedical applications. In this chapter, we will provide a comprehensive review on spiral inertial microfluidics including (1) conventional and microfluidic cell sorting techniques, (2) introduction to inertial microfluidics and Dean-coupled inertial focusing, (3) classification of major spiral devices, (4) summary of different biomedical applications, (5) recent advances in next generation spiral cell sorters, and (6) highlight key challenges for future research. With increasing advancement in microfabrication and computational simulation, we envision that spiral inertial microfluidics will play a leading role in driving research and commercialization in clinical diagnostics, as well as other research areas in chemistry and material sciences.