DNA framework signal amplification platform-based high-throughput systemic immune monitoring
Ye Chen, Xingyu Chen, Bowen Zhang, Yuxin Zhang, Songhang Li, Zhiqiang Liu, Yang Gao, Yuxuan Zhao, Yan Lin, Yi Li, Taoran Tian, Yunfeng Lin
Abstract
Systemic immune monitoring is a crucial clinical tool for disease early diagnosis, prognosis and treatment planning by quantitative analysis of immune cells. However, conventional immune monitoring using flow cytometry faces huge challenges in large-scale sample testing, especially in mass health screenings, because of time-consuming, technical-sensitive and high-cost features. However, the lack of high-performance detection platforms hinders the development of high-throughput immune monitoring technology. To address this bottleneck, we constructed a generally applicable DNA framework signal amplification platform (DSAP) based on post-systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment and DNA tetrahedral framework-structured probe design to achieve high-sensitive detection for diverse immune cells, including CD4+, CD8+ T-lymphocytes, and monocytes (down to 1/100 μl). Based on this advanced detection platform, we present a novel high-throughput immune-cell phenotyping system, DSAP, achieving 30-min one-step immune-cell phenotyping without cell washing and subset analysis and showing comparable accuracy with flow cytometry while significantly reducing detection time and cost. As a proof-of-concept, DSAP demonstrates excellent diagnostic accuracy in immunodeficiency staging for 107 HIV patients (AUC > 0.97) within 30 min, which can be applied in HIV infection monitoring and screening. Therefore, we initially introduced promising DSAP to achieve high-throughput immune monitoring and open robust routes for point-of-care device development.