Description

Profiling Immune Cells by Massive Parallel Single Cell Manipulation on an Opto-Fluidic Chip: Import, Culture, Assay, Export

Magali Soumillon, Mckenzi Toh, Yara Mejia, Ravi Ramenani, Minha Park, Jason Briggs, Hariharasudhan Chirra, Abhik Shah, Adrienne Higa, Xiaohua Wang, Kevin Chapman, Mark White

Berkeley Lights Inc., Emeryville, CA, USA

Immunotherapies hold great promise in controlling or potentially curing a wide range of diseases. However, there is still much to learn about the immune system in the context of targeting these diseases in order to realize the potential of this novel class of therapies. Innovative tools that aid in the identification and manipulation of immune cells including T or B cells will increase our understanding of mechanisms controlling immune cells and drive these therapies into the clinic.

Here we present Berkeley Lights’ proprietary OptoSelect™ technology that enables precise manipulation of cells, including T cells and B cells, using low-intensity light on an OptoFluidic™ chip. For the first time, individual cells can be selectively isolated, cultured, assayed, processed for nucleic acid isolation, and exported for further genomic studies on a single chip. Cell growth and cell to cell interaction can also be tracked and monitored via time lapse imaging.

To demonstrate the flexibility of our technology, we isolated separate samples of T cells, memory B cells, and plasma cells as single cells or groups of cells on chip using light based dielectrophoreis. A series of assays were performed to further characterize the cells. The T cells and B cells were also cultured for several days. Additional characterization of isolated cells included capture of either T Cell Receptor (TCR) or B Cell Receptor (BCR) sequences from isolated and annotated single T cell or B cell clones. With the capability to culture primary cells and perform various functional assays, our system provides a complete and extremely flexible solution to empower research and discovery, especially in the growing field of immuno-oncology