Prospective Use of High-Refractive Index Materials for Single Molecule Detection in Flow Cytometry

Phenotyping extracellular vesicles (EVs), where surface receptor expression is often as low as one molecule per EV, remains problematic due to the inability of commercial flow cytometers to provide single-fluorescent molecule sensitivity. While EVs are widely considered to be of great potential as diagnostic, prognostic and theranostic biomarkers, their use is currently hindered by the lack of tools available to accurately and reproducibly enumerate and phenotype them. Herein, we propose a new class of labels that leverage the biophysical properties of materials with unique complex refractive indices and demonstrate that this class of labels has the possibility of allowing single-epitope detection using conventional flow cytometry.