# An acoustofluidic avidity cytometer for massive parallel profiling single autoreactive T cell in autoimmune disease

> **NIH NIH DP2** · TRUSTEES OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $2,377,500

## Abstract

Project Summary
Autoreactive T cell responses target central nervous system-derived autoantigens and cause several
demyelinating autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, and
neuromyelitis optica. Multiple sclerosis, the most common of these diseases affecting over two million people
worldwide and approximately 400,000 people in United States, is a chronic inflammatory disease, causing
lesions and plaques of demyelination in the brain and spinal cord. However, none of the current clinical tests can
confidently predict clinical multiple sclerosis progression or treatment efficacy due to a lack of sufficiently
sensitive and effective biomarkers.
T cells in multiple sclerosis patients display an activated phenotype with an increased avidity to myelin protein.
As a result, we hypothesize that the avidity of autoreactive T cells is a disease marker that can be used to monitor
disease progress, judge therapeutic response, or discover new biochemical disease markers for multiple
sclerosis. However, none of the current technologies have achieved high-sensitivity and high-throughput
measurement of cell avidity, in clinical samples, at the single cell level. The PI’s engineering advances in
‘Acoustofluidics,’ allowing for precise manipulation of single cells and liquids at unexpected resolution, shows
promising potential for measuring the avidity of highly heterogeneous, clinical autoreactive T cells as well as for
potentially sorting and analyzing single cell of interest, when combined with the PI’s ‘High Throughput
Microfluidic’ technology.
The objective is to create an acoustofluidic avidity cytometer to overcome the barriers in detecting clinical
autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis. However, there are several significant hurdles which include
building a high-sensitivity and high-throughput avidity cytometer to profile single autoreactive myelin-specific T
cells and determine their avidity distribution in clinical samples. Incorporating high-throughput microfluidics will
allow the screening of single autoreactive T cells of interest for new autoantigens. The proposed instrumentation
will potentially revolutionize the current clinical testing and discovery new markers for diagnosis, prognosis, and
treatment efficacy of autoimmune disease including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, etc.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10002377
- **Project number:** 1DP2AI160242-01
- **Recipient organization:** TRUSTEES OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Feng Guo
- **Activity code:** DP2 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $2,377,500
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-08-25 → 2025-03-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10002377

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10002377, An acoustofluidic avidity cytometer for massive parallel profiling single autoreactive T cell in autoimmune disease (1DP2AI160242-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10002377. Licensed CC0.

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