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Whole blood biophysical immune profiling of newborn infants correlates with immune responses
Kerwin Kwek Zeming1, Genevieve Llanora2, Kaiyun Quek1
1Critical Analytics for Manufacturing of Personalized Medicine, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, Singapore, Singapore.
Insights
A new blood-sparing diagnostic tool, the BiophysicaL Immune Profiling for Infants (BLIPI) system, accurately assesses infant immune status. It distinguishes between term and preterm infants and correlates with clinical markers, offering real-time immune monitoring.
Area of Science:
- Neonatal immunology
- Biophysical analysis
- Diagnostic technology
Background:
- Lack of reliable, blood-sparing diagnostic tools for real-time infant inflammation and immune cell monitoring.
- Need for minimally invasive methods to assess immune status in neonates.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce and evaluate the BiophysicaL Immune Profiling for Infants (BLIPI) system.
- To assess the potential of biophysical immune cell profiling for monitoring neonatal immune activation.
Main Methods:
- Deployment of the BLIPI system in a neonatal intensive care unit.
- Analysis of immune cell biophysical profiles from 50 microliters of blood per sample.
- Recruitment of term and preterm infants for sample collection.
Main Results:
- Distinct differences in immune cell size and deformation profiles between term and preterm infants (48/50 markers significant).
- Identification of notable cell size and deformability differences in a preterm infant with bacterial sepsis.
- Significant correlations between biophysical profiles and clinical markers (CRP, WBC, I:T ratio) with high Pearson coefficients (0.98, 0.97, 0.94).
Conclusions:
- The BLIPI system offers a novel, minimally invasive method for rapid assessment of infant immune status.
- Biophysical immune cell profiling shows potential for real-time monitoring of immune activation and response in neonates.
- The system requires significantly less blood volume (20x less) than standard tests.
Background:
There is a current, absence of reliable, blood-sparing, diagnostic tools to measure and trend real-time changes in the levels of inflammation and its effects on the immune cells in the infant.
Methods:
We deployed the BiophysicaL Immune Profiling for Infants (BLIPI) system in the neonatal intensive care unit to describe immune cell biophysical profiles using 50 microliters of blood per sample from term and preterm infants.
Results:
A total of 19 infants (8 term, 11 preterm) were recruited and 24 blood samples were collected in their first month. Based on the profiles of immune cells' size and deformation, there was a clear distinction between term and preterm infants, with 48/50 markers significantly different. A preterm infant with late-onset bacterial sepsis had notable size and deformability differences compared to the rest of the preterm cohort. There was a significant correlation between immune cell biophysical profiles and clinical markers such as C-reactive protein, white blood cell counts, and immature-to-total neutrophil (I:T) ratios, with Pearson correlation coefficients for linear regression models of 0.98, 0.97 and 0.94 respectively.
Conclusion:
This study highlights the potential for the biophysical immune cell profiling system to provide an overview of the infant's current immune activation and response.
Impact:
We present a novel, minimally invasive diagnostic system that leverages the physical properties of immune cells to provide a rapid and direct assessment of the immune status, requiring 20 times less blood volume than standard tests. This study demonstrates the potential of a compact, deployable system that is capable of performing biophysical profiling to assess immune cell activation in term and preterm infants, by revealing distinct differences in cell size and deformation between groups. The system's sensitive, quantitative measures were correlated with routine clinical biomarkers, highlighting its ability to provide a rapid, minimally invasive, real-time monitoring of neonatal immune status.
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