New method can give a "health check" to individual immune cells.

The Karolinska Institute in Sweden, in collaboration with the Swedish Life Sciences Laboratory, has developed a new method to analyze the status of immune cells in the blood, allowing for the acquisition of multiple physical properties of individual immune cells. Test results show that this method can distinguish between immune cells from patients with atherosclerosis and those from healthy individuals. The Karolinska Institute noted in a press release that physical properties such as the structure of the cell membrane and mitochondrial function can affect the movement of immune cells, intercellular communication, and their response to inflammation. However, it has been challenging to measure these physical properties simultaneously in large populations of cells. The researchers have developed a new method called "spectral biophysical cytometry," which can measure multiple physical properties of individual cells simultaneously in very large cell populations. This method combines fluorescent nanosensors that can detect changes in the physical environment of cells with advanced flow cytometry, which uses lasers to analyze thousands of cells one by one within minutes, obtaining various physical properties for each cell.