UCLA engineers put the squeeze on cells to diagnose disease

University of California, Los Angeles bioengineering researchers have taken advantage of cells' physical properties to develop a new instrument that slams cells against a wall of fluid and quickly analyzes the physical response, allowing for the identification of cancer and other cell states without expensive chemical tags. The instrument, called a deformability cytometer, was developed by UCLA biomedical engineering doctoral students and an assistant professor. It consists of a miniaturized microfluidic chip that sequentially aligns cells so that they hit a wall of fluid at rates of thousands of cells per second. A specialized camera captures microscopic images of these cells at a rate of 140,000 pictures per second, and these images are then automatically analyzed by custom software to extract information about the cells' physical properties. With the deformability cytometer, the group can prepare samples and conduct an analysis of tens of thousands of cells in 10 to 30 minutes.