Magnetic fingerprints of rolling cells for quantitative flow cytometry in whole blood

Over the past 50 years, flow cytometry has had a profound impact on preclinical and clinical applications requiring single cell function information for counting, sub-typing and quantification of epitope expression. At the same time, the workflow complexity and high costs of such optical systems still limit flow cytometry applications to specialized laboratories. Here, we present a quantitative magnetic flow cytometer that incorporates in situ magnetophoretic cell focusing for highly accurate and reproducible rolling of the cellular targets over giant magnetoresistance sensing elements. Time-of-flight analysis is used to unveil quantitative single cell information contained in its magnetic fingerprint. Furthermore, we used erythrocytes as a biological model to validate our methodology with respect to precise analysis of the hydrodynamic cell diameter, quantification of binding capacity of immunomagnetic labels, and discrimination of cell morphology. The extracted time-of-flight information should enable point-of-care quantitative flow cytometry in whole blood for clinical applications, such as immunology and primary hemostasis.