https://phys.org/news/2018-08-microfluidic-chip-analysis-cells.html

Scientists from the University of Washington (Seattle, USA), Iowa State University (Ames, USA), and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Seattle, USA) have used microfluidic technology to overcome these problems. All of the necessary steps occur reliably on a specially developed microchip using minimal amounts of solvent and without requiring the cells to be marked. In contrast to conventional microfluidic chips, this one requires neither complex fabrication technology nor components like valves or agitators.

The Self-Digitization Dielectrophoretic (SD-DEP) chip is about the size of a coin and has two parallel microchannels (50 μm deep x 35 μm wide x 3.2 cm long) connected by numerous tiny little chambers. The openings of the microchannels are only 15 μm wide. A thin electrode is stretched along the length of the channels. The channels and chambers are filled with a buffer, an alternating voltage is applied, and the sample is added to one of the microchannels. The team headed by Robbyn K. Anand and Daniel T. Chiu used leukemia cells in their experiments.