Decreased deformability of lymphocytes in chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Yi Zheng, Jun Wen, John Nguyen, Mark A. Cachia, Chen Wang, Yu Sun

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

49 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper reports the first study of stiffness/deformability changes of lymphocytes in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients, demonstrating that at the single cell level, leukemic metastasis progresses are accompanied by biophysical property alterations. A microfluidic device was utilized to electrically measure cell volume and transit time of single lymphocytes from healthy and CLL patients. The results from testing thousands of cells reveal that lymphocytes from CLL patients have higher stiffness (i.e., lower deformability), as compared to lymphocytes in healthy samples, which was also confirmed by AFM indentation tests. This observation is in sharp contrast to the known knowledge on other types of metastatic cells (e.g., breast and lung cancer cells) whose stiffness becomes lower as metastasis progresses.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number7613
JournalScientific reports
Volume5
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 9 2015
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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