Hydrodynamic stretching for prostate cancer detection

Advances in diagnostic technologies enabled scientists to link a large number of diseases with structural changes of the intracellular organisation. This intrinsic biophysical characteristic opened up the possibility to perform clinical assessments based on the measurement of single-cell mechanical properties. In this work, we combine microfluidics, high speed imaging and computational automatic tracking to measure the single-cell deformability of large samples of prostate cancer cells at a rate of ~ 10 4 cells/s . Such a high throughput accounts for the inherent heterogeneity of biological samples and enabled us to extract statistically meaningful signatures from each cell population. In addition, using our technique we investigate the effect of Latrunculin A to the cellular stiffness.