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Tracking immune cells: a small SciLifeLab-developed chip with big possibilities

Not all immune cells act the same way. Studying a group of immune cells, you can get an average response but you might miss important details. Sometimes you want to get a clearer picture of what’s actually happening, especially when immune responses vary a lot. That’s where studying individual cells comes in, and this newly developed chip makes that much easier.

This is good news for everyone

This method will aid researchers in understanding how specific cells work under different conditions. Which could lead to better treatments for cancer or immune-related diseases. The plan is to develop workflows for personalized care, where different immune therapies are tested against microtumors of the patient’s own cells.

“The miniaturized format and all-in-one solution going from culture to microscopy analysis in the same platform allows the development of fast, robust and efficient workflows. It also reduces the consumption of precious cells and reagents, which paves the way for rapid and efficient sensitivity assessment,” says KTH professor and SciLifeLab researcher Björn Önfelt.

Perhaps it’s even better news for researchers

The microwell chip provides a better way to study immune cells in complex environments. It’s also small, cheap, disposable and easy to use. It supports growing and observing live cells in controlled conditions, either as flat layers (like cells naturally growing on a surface) or spheroids (tiny, ball-shaped clusters that mimic 3D structures like tumors). The researchers also show what they call “correlative assays” where cells are first followed live over time, and then fixed, fluorescently labelled and studied in detail by high-resolution microscopy.

Önfelt hopes to see more researchers try it out. “The chip has proven very useful for us, it is used daily in the lab. We hope that other groups will be interested in testing it for their applications. One particularly useful feature is that the chip allows high-quality imaging, which is typically not the case for plastic substrates.”

There are other methods such as flow cytometry and single-cell RNA sequencing. These “snapshot” methods will show you what proteins and genes they’re using at a specific moment. However, they don’t combine well to directly link that information with how the cells act (its dynamics).

In summary, it’s a new chip with practical features for cell culture and microscopy-based analysis, all-in-one.

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Last updated: 2025-01-20

Content Responsible: victor kuismin(victor.kuismin@scilifelab.uu.se)