**Author details**

Youngchan Kim, Kyoohyun Kim and YongKeun Park *Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea* 

## **Acknowledgement**

The authors wish to acknowledge supports from KAIST, KAIST Institute for Optical Science and Technology, Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) grant No. 2009-0087691 (BRL), and National Research Foundation (NRF) (2011-355-c00039, 2012R1A1A1009082). YKP acknowledges support from TJ ChungAm Foundation. KHK is supported by Global Ph.D. Fellowship from NRF of Korea.

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**Chapter 11** 

© 2012 Mohamed, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,

© 2012 Mohamed, licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The cell is the basic functional unit within a tissue or an organ. Methods that can be used to probe the cell, so as to understand, or even manipulate its interrelated processes, pathways, and/or overall functioning, are of great scientific and commercial value. Research efforts in molecular biology, biochemistry, and biotechnology over the last two decades have created high demand for efficient, cost-effective, cell enrichment, isolation, and handling methods. Cell studies can be performed on continuously growing cell lines, many of which are commercially available, in tissue culture, or on cells obtained from intact tissues or isolated

Mammalian cells are highly heterogeneous in structure, function, and characteristics. However, many types of biochemical, pharmaceutical, and clinical studies, such as immunophenotyping, studies of the cell cycle, cell proliferation, or apoptosis, and other specialized cell analyses require a homogenous population consisting of a single cell type; as the analyte. Only then can the results deemed accurate and specific to the cell type under investigation [4, 5]. Accordingly, techniques to separate cell types in a heterogeneous cell population are of immense practical value. Any such efforts are further complicated when the target cell is rare within a population such as in many cancer and prenatal diagnosis applications. The more stringent the requirements for specific and precise cell separation, the greater the degree of accuracy and reproducibility required in the technology that

Recent progress in microfabrication, technologies developed and utilized by the integrated circuits (ICs) industry, is being exploited to biomedicine, spawning a relatively new field of research that has become known as BioMEMS. Microfabricated devices have already had a

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Use of Microfluidic Technology** 

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

**for Cell Separation** 

Hisham Mohamed

**1. Introduction** 

from blood [1-3].

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/50382

**1.1. Motivation for cell sorting** 

underlies the separation method [6-8].

