Single-cell compressibility quantification for assessing metastatic potential of cancer cells through multi-frequency acoustophoresis

Analyzing cancer cell compressibility with single-cell resolution is of high interest in understanding cancer metastasis as well as in other cell biology applications. Here, a multi-frequency acoustophoretic cell alignment technique to precisely control cell positions in 3D space was developed, and combined with our recently developed numerical acoustophoresis model, which allowed extracting the compressibility of cells with high accuracy. This technology was applied to measure the compressibility of different head and neck cancer (HNC) cell lines that have different metastatic potential. This method can be a simple, non-contact, accurate, and low-cost solution for studying cell biomechanics and utilizing such biomechanical properties in evaluating the metastatic potential of cancer cells.