I-Corps: Generalization Platform for Single Cell Characterization

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project will be the development of technology to improve drug discovery and medicine. In cell manufacturing, where human cells are engineered to treat injury or disease, the technology may be used to efficiently test the safety and potency of the cells, which will in turn contribute to more effective, less costly, and safer cell therapies. In drug development, the technology may provide a way to obtain highly characterized information when screening pharmaceutical compounds, leading to novel therapies. In medical diagnostics, personalized medicine, and companion diagnostics, the technology may provide better and faster methods for analyzing patient cells and predicting patient responses to treatment. Overall, this project will have broad societal impacts by improving how treatments for diseases are developed and manufactured. This I-Corps project is based on the development of technologies to enable information-rich, fast, and disposable assays for large-scale single-cell characterization. The technology under investigation is a microfluidic device for high-throughput and high-content imaging-based measurements of single cells. The device consists of a dense array of traps into which hundreds of individual cells can be deterministically loaded and trapped within a few minutes. Once cells are arrayed, measurements of cell phenotype and function can be made using readily available reagents and imaging-based measurements. Previous work has optimized the design of the device for fast, deterministic, and high density trapping of cells. The device has been applied in a number of different contexts for studying the biology of cells, cell aggregates, embryos, and organoids, such as studying the signaling dynamics of T cells and the interactions between T cells and antigen presenting cells using high-resolution imaging. The results of these studies have provided important insights into how cells of the immune system function, which has implications for better understanding human health and treating disease.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.