Whole blood profiling reveals biophysical immune response signatures for clinical triage

Abstract

Host immune response plays a critical role in disease manifestation, severity and death. Rapid immune profiling enables early clinical triage of disease severity within the emergency department. We develop a 15-min label-free immune response biophysical profiling method from 10μl of unprocessed blood using deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) assay combinatorial profiling. We correlated biophysical markers of immune cell size, deformability, distribution and counts with known immune response states from clinical donors (n = 77). The speed and accuracy of patient stratification demonstrated in this work has a clear impact in terms of enabling deployable point-of-care systems for rapid patient triage.