Acoustofluidic Separation of Cardiomyocytes

Abstract: Heart failure is one of the most common reasons for death in the modern society. As the field of tissue engineering is evolving, cardiac patches as treatment for suffering patients holds future promise. However, methods for efficient purification of cardiomyocytes from biopsies are lacking, hindering the development of such solutions. Here a novel method for separation of cardiomyocytes in a microfluidic chip is investigated. The separation is based on acoustophoresis, the use of ultrasonic waves in a microfluidic channel to focus particles of different properties, such as size, density and compressibility. Although the method seemed promising, experimental evaluation showed unsatisfactory results. This was mainly due to a lack of well-performing markers to analyze the efficiency of the separation, and concerns that the subpopulations present in the tissue have too similar properties to enable good separation with this method.