A synchronized pulsing rotary blood pump offers a simple and powerful control modality for heart unloading. This technique provides pulsatile hemodynamics, which is more physiologic than continuous blood flow and may be useful for perfusion of the other organs.
High throughput heterogeneous immunoassays that screen antigen-specific antibody secreting cells are essential to accelerate monoclonal antibody discovery for therapeutic applications. Here, we introduce a heterogeneous single cell immunoassay based on alginate microparticles as permeable cell culture chambers. Using a microfluidic device, we encapsulated single antibody secreting cells in 35-40 μm diameter alginate microbeads. We functionalized the alginate to capture the secreted antibodies inside the microparticles, enabling single cell analysis and preventing the cross-talk between the neighboring encapsulated cells. We demonstrated non-covalent functionalization of alginate microparticles by adding three secondary antibodies to the alginate solution to form high molecular weight complexes that become trapped in the porous nanostructure of alginate and capture the secreted antibodies. We screened anti-TNF-alpha antibody-secreting cells from a mixture of antibody-secreting cells.
An improved internal gelation approach is developed to encapsulate single mammalian cells in monodisperse alginate microbeads as small as 26 lm in diameter and at rates of up to 1 kHz with high cell viability. The cell damage resulting from contact with calcium carbonate nanoparticles as gelation reagents is eliminated by employing a co-flow microfluidic device, and the cell exposure to low pH is minimized by a chemically balanced off-chip gelation step. These modifications significantly improve the viability of cells encapsulated in gelled alginate particles. Two different mammalian cell types are encapsulated with viability of over 84 %. The cells are functional and continue to grow inside the microparticles. Keywords Single cell encapsulation Á Alginate Á Droplet-based microfluidics Samin Akbari and Tohid Pirbodaghi have contributed equally to this article.
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