Isolating rare circulating tumor cells(CTCs)from blood is critical for the downstream analysis that is important in cancer-related research,diagnosis,and medicine,and efforts are ongoing to increase the efficiency and purity of CTC isolation in microfluidics.Reported in this paper is a two-stage integrated microfluidic chip for coarse-to-fine CTC isolation from whole blood.First,blood cells are removed by filtration using a micropore-array membrane,then CTCs and other cells that are trapped in the micropores are peeled off the membrane by a novel release method based on air-liquid interfacial tension,which significantly increases the recovery rate of CTCs.The second stage is CTC capture based on an on-chip dense immuno-magnetic-bead clump,which offers high capture efficiency and purity.Both the micropore filtration and immuno-magnetic-bead capture are validated and optimized experimentally.Overall,the integrated microfluidic chip can realize a recovery rate of 85.5%and a purity of 37.8%for rare cancer cells spiked in whole blood.