Optofluidic Nanoplasmonic Biosensors for Functional Immune Analysis Towards Next Generation Immunoassays

Abstract

Building predictive models of immunity requires comprehensive understanding of the complex and dynamic functional behavior of immune system. Cytokines are the key biomolecules secreted by immune cells and essential for intercellular signaling to regulate the diverse functions in the immune response. Rapid and accurate quantification of cytokine-based immune fingerprints provides clinically and immunologically useful information related to infectious diseases, cancer, autoimmune diseases, and allergy transplantation. Current "gold standard" method based on Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) requires time-consuming sample labeling and washing processes, resulting in long assay time and can only provide snapshot signal readouts at the end of the measurement. Thus, there is an emerging clinical demand for transformative platforms that can perform multi-parametric cytokine detection to understand the dynamical immune response of the patient in a rapid and accurate manner. In this presentation, we will introduce a number of novel plasmonic nanomaterial based optofluidic biosensing platforms that can perform rapid, high throughput, sensitive and multiplex cytokine detection from whole blood to single-cell level. The multi-scale research both experimentally and theoretically will bridge the gap in fundamental understanding of immune system and enhance the applicability, diagnosis and prediction power for immune system diseases. The developed platforms would ultimately gear the biologists and clinicians with capability to real-time monitor the immune status in patients, a transformative achievement that has enormous implications to fundamental research and clinical applications.