The invention discloses a CTC (circulating tumor cell) capturing and purifying substrate based on chitosan nanoparticles as well as a preparation method and an application of the CTC capturing and purifying substrate. Chitosan with good cytocompatibility is selected for constructing a three-dimensional nanostructure 'soft' substrate, anti-adhesion molecules such as PEG (polyethylene glycol) molecules are introduced to reduce the nonspecific adhesion of cells on an interface, affine CTC capturing molecules such as EpCAM (epithelial cell adhesion molecule) aptamers are used for high-specific capturing of CTCs, and the purity of target cells is further improved in an in-situ culturing manner of the captured cells on the basis of proliferation attribute difference of the CTCs and blood cells. The CTC capturing and purifying substrate has good cytocompatibility and can keep the activity of the captured cells, a preparation process is simple and convenient, the cost is low, in-situ culturing and purification of the captured cells can be realized, and large-scale implementation is easy to realize.