Mij
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Stanford researchers quickly isolate rare, allergen-reactive white blood cells, called basophils, using microfluidics and magnets. The new device could help revolutionize allergy diagnosis from the current slow and painful process of skin tests and oral food challenges.
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/05/2...anford_202205241015_sf165178698&sf165178698=1
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/05/2...anford_202205241015_sf165178698&sf165178698=1
Abstract
Despite their rarity in peripheral blood, basophils play important roles in allergic disorders and other diseases including sepsis and COVID-19. Existing basophil isolation methods require many manual steps and suffer from significant variability in purity and recovery. We report an integrated basophil isolation device (i-BID) in microfluidics for negative immunomagnetic selection of basophils directly from 100 μL of whole blood within 10 minutes. We use a simulation-driven pipeline to design a magnetic separation module to apply an exponentially increasing magnetic force to capture magnetically tagged non-basophils flowing through a microtubing sandwiched between magnetic flux concentrators sweeping across a Halbach array. The exponential profile captures non-basophils effectively while preventing their excessive initial buildup causing clogging. The i-BID isolates basophils with a mean purity of 93.9% ± 3.6% and recovery of 95.6% ± 3.4% without causing basophil degradation or unintentional activation. Our i-BID has the potential to enable basophil-based point-of-care diagnostics such as rapid allergy assessment.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/lc/d2lc00154c