Landmark development in circulate cytometry expertise

Becton, Dickinson and Company, a world medical expertise firm, at this time introduced {that a} research performed in collaboration with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and revealed as the duvet story of the January 21 concern of the journal Science profiles a brand new BD innovation in circulate cytometry that provides fluorescence imaging and image-based decisioning to type particular person cells at exceptionally excessive velocity, primarily based on the visible particulars of every cell and never solely on the kind or amount of biomarkers which can be current. The new expertise has the potential to remodel immunology, cell biology and genomics analysis and allow new cell-based therapeutic discovery.

Cell sorting by means of flow cytometry is a method that permits scientists to establish and type particular person cells primarily based on particular traits of every cell in an effort to research them in additional element, consider how every cell might react to a brand new drug or carry out different single cell experiments. Traditionally, cell sorters function by means of identification and quantification of sure biomarkers (e.g. proteins) on or inside a cell. The new innovation from BD, referred to as BD CellView Image Technology, can seize a number of photographs of particular person cells flowing by means of the system at a velocity of 15,000 cells per second and likewise provides a beforehand inconceivable functionality of sorting cells primarily based on detailed microscopic picture evaluation of particular person cells at this velocity.

By including imaging to the normal biomarker identification and quantification, the brand new technology not solely identifies if and the way a lot of a biomarker is current within the cell, but additionally its location or how it’s distributed inside the cell. By imaging the distribution of biomarkers with this expertise, researchers receive detailed details about cells that was beforehand invisible in conventional circulate cytometry experiments, which allows them to reply advanced organic questions, comparable to how cells develop, operate and work together, or to review actual places of viruses or proteins inside a cell, all at a extremely accelerated tempo.

“This innovation has overcome the typical compromise between speed and precision of sorting individual cells,” mentioned Tom Polen, chairman, CEO and president of BD. “This breakthrough essentially equates to a researcher looking into a microscope, identifying specific characteristics of a cell of interest, and based on what they see, sorting each individual cell for further analysis—all at a rate of nearly 1 million cells every minute. The technology can analyze more than 1,000 times the amount of data compared to traditional flow cytometry methods, and sort cells at a rate of 15,000 per second based on their images. BD was the first company to commercialize flow cytometry technology in the 1970s, and this is yet another example of our storied history of innovation and technical leadership in this space.”

The new technology fills a long-standing hole in biomedical research by enabling scientists to extra quickly view and isolate cells with particular, observable traits of curiosity, which might speed up discovery analysis and unlock potential therapies or cures for illness in a broad vary of fields comparable to virology and oncology.

“This technology represents the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of work from a highly multidisciplinary team of optical, mechanical, electrical, biomedical and software engineers and scientists that aimed to provide researchers a differentiated and flexible capability for analyzing single cells,” mentioned Eric Diebold, worldwide vp of R&D for BD Biosciences and co-corresponding writer of the paper. “We have just scratched the surface of the types of science that will be enabled with this new high-throughput image-based cell sorting technology, and we look forward to how BD and the scientific community at-large will leverage it to advance both basic research and the development of therapeutics.”

Details of the research

In the research revealed in Science, researchers used BD CellView Image Technology to review regulators of the NF-κB (nuclear issue kappa gentle chain enhancer of activated B cells) pathway, a protein advanced that performs an essential position in mobile immunity and stress response. The EMBL group measured the exercise on this pathway by monitoring the placement of RelA, a protein that strikes from the cytoplasm into the nucleus of the cell upon activation. Using BD CellView Image Technology, the display allowed them to establish a number of novel regulators of this essential mobile pathway in a matter of hours, as a substitute of days as can be required utilizing standard approaches. This end result has broad implications for accelerating the tempo of genomic analysis and therapeutic discovery.

“For years, researchers have desired a system for cell sorting that would allow them to get a detailed picture of a cell’s inner workings and to isolate those with microscopic phenotypes of interest,” mentioned Dr. Lars Steinmetz, senior scientist at EMBL, professor of genetics at Stanford University and co-corresponding writer of the paper. “This is what BD CellView Image Technology achieves, defining a new standard in cell isolation and characterization. We are excited about applying this technology to high-resolution genomic screening aimed at collecting functional information for every part of the genome. We are also exploring applications for cell-based diagnostics and characterization of cells in health and disease.”

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