Cell Sorting

Resolving heterogeneity by isolating pure cells with single-cell precision

Cell sorting technologies allow the separation of the different cell types present in a biological sample, and are needed to refine subsequent downstream phenotypic or genotypic analysis to single cell resolution. 

Cell sorting is especially important for studying tumor heterogeneity; first by separating tumor cells from other cells present in the tumor microenvironment and then by separating different population of tumor cells.  Overcoming tumor heterogeneity is a prerequisite to obtaining the precise genetic information that drives discoveries and ultimately guides better therapeutic approaches.  

The DEPArray^™ PLUS is the only image-based automated platform that can identify and recover rare target tumor cells present in heterogeneous samples, like FFPE tissue biopsies or enriched blood, enabling high sensitivity and high resolution molecular analysis of the resulting pure cell population or single cells.  

DEPArray sorting is particularly appropriate to situations where:  

• target cells are rare in the mixture, like circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in blood; 
• cellularity of the sample is low or variable among samples; 
• a pure, homogeneous cell population is needed for downstream quantitative analysis.