BOSTON — A plashet of blood slowly leaks out from atop the microfluidics chip in Daniel Haber’s lab here at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center. “That’s not supposed to happen,” murmurs technician Jenna Lord, as she carefully pipettes the fluid into a Falcon tube.

The blood, taken from a man with elevated levels of prostate-specific antigen who is suspected of having cancer, is being pushed through eight tiny channels, each coated with cancer-specific antibodies to capture any circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Four years ago, Haber and his MGH colleague Mehmet Toner first reported the effectiveness of such a microfluidics-based contraption for isolating CTCs, which are approximately one out of every billion cells in the blood. And last year, they refined their invention to create a platform that can be manufactured on a commercial scale with improved cell capture rates.

“Now, you can draw a blood sample and say, ‘aha, this is the molecular status of my tumor, and this is how it has or has not been changed by the drugs I’ve been given,’” Haber says.

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Image of CTC chip from Shannon Stott, MGH