A Microfluidics Approach for Ovarian Cancer Immune Monitoring in an Outpatient Setting

Among cancer diagnoses in women, ovarian cancer has the fifth-highest mortality rate. Current treatments are unsatisfactory, and new therapies are highly needed. Immunotherapies show great promise but have not reached their full potential in ovarian cancer patients. Implementation of an immune readout could offer better guidance and development of immunotherapies. However, immune profiling is often performed using a flow cytometer, which is bulky, complex, and expensive. This equipment is centralized and operated by highly trained personnel, making it cumbersome and time-consuming. We aim to develop a disposable microfluidic chip capable of performing an immune readout with the sensitivity needed to guide diagnostic decision making as close as possible to the patient. As a proof of concept of the fluidics module of this concept, acquisition of a limited immune panel based on CD45, CD8, programmed cell death protein 1 (PD1), and a live/dead marker was compared to a conventional flow cytometer (BD FACSymphony). Based on a dataset of peripheral blood mononuclear cells of 15 patients with ovarian cancer across different stages of treatment, we obtained a 99% correlation coefficient for the detection of CD8+PD1+ T cells relative to the total amount of CD45+ white blood cells. Upon further system development comprising further miniaturization of optics, this microfluidics chip could enable immune monitoring in an outpatient setting, facilitating rapid acquisition of data without the need for highly trained staff.