Integrating Immunology and Microfluidics for Single Immune Cell Analysis

Abstract

The field of immunoengineering aims to develop novel therapies and modern vaccines to manipulate and modulate the immune system and applies innovative technologies toward improved understanding of the immune system in health and disease. Microfluidics has proven to be an excellent technology for analytics in biology and chemistry. From simple microsystem chips to complex microfluidic designs, these platforms have witnessed an immense growth over the last decades with frequent emergence of new designs. Microfluidics provides a highly robust and precise tool which led to its widespread application in single-cell analysis of immune cells. Single-cell analysis allows scientists to account for the heterogeneous behavior of immune cells which often gets overshadowed when conventional bulk study methods are used. Application of single-cell analysis using microfluidics has facilitated the identification of several novel functional immune cell subsets, quantification of signaling molecules, and understanding of cellular communication and signaling pathways. Single-cell analysis research in combination with microfluidics has paved the way for the development of novel therapies, point-of-care diagnostics, and even more complex microfluidic platforms that aid in creating in vitro cellular microenvironments for applications in drug and toxicity screening. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview on the integration of microsystems and microfluidics with immunology and focus on different designs developed to decode single immune cell behavior and cellular communication. We have categorized the microfluidic designs in three specific categories: microfluidic chips with cell traps, valve-based microfluidics, and droplet microfluidics that have facilitated the ongoing research in the field of immunology at single-cell level.

Establishment of a scalable microfluidic assay for characterization of population‐based neutrophil chemotaxis

“…Many of the previously described microfluidic devices measuring chemotaxis focused on the analysis of single‐cell chemotactic migration and relied on manual tracking of the trajectories of 10 0 ‐10 2 selected cells . In contrast, the device presented here allows a fully automated and trajectory‐free analysis of the chemotaxis of populations of ≥10 3 cells, which self‐sort in the observation chambers of the device according to the undergone chemotactic migration.…”

How single-cell immunology is benefiting from microfluidic technologies

“…Our focus here is on single-cell microfluidic techniques for immune applications, this topic has also been described by excellent reviews. We strongly suggest our readers to complement their readings with those reviews 10,[29][30][31][32][33] .…”

“…In this review we will focus only on their uses for single immune cell studies. Other applications and uses of active microfluidic systems can be found in several reviews 10,[29][30][31][32][33] .…”

Noninvasive and safe cell viability assay for Paramecium using natural pigment extracted from food

“…Compared to Lab-on-a-chip with the microwells 47 , which is a device used in the conventional method for capturing live cells, this method is characterized by the ability to easily fabricate a low-cost and robust cell capture. In addition, Modeling mesh of various shapes and sizes is available, and various cell capture can be selected.…”