By adding imaging to the traditional biomarker identification and quantification, the new technology not only identifies if and how much of a biomarker is present in the cell but also its location or how it is distributed within the cell. By imaging the distribution of biomarkers with this technology, researchers obtain detailed information about cells that was previously invisible in traditional flow cytometry experiments, which enables them to answer complex biological questions, such as how cells grow, function and interact, or to study exact locations of viruses or proteins within a cell, all at a highly accelerated pace.

“This innovation has overcome the typical compromise between speed and precision of sorting individual cells,” said Tom Polen, chairman, CEO and president of BD. “This breakthrough essentially equates to a researcher looking into a microscope, identifying specific characteristics of a cell of interest, and based on what they see, sorting each individual cell for further analysis—all at a rate of nearly 1 million cells every minute. The technology can analyze more than 1,000 times the amount of data compared to traditional flow cytometry methods and sort cells at a rate of 15,000 per second based on their images. BD was the first company to commercialize flow cytometry technology in the 1970s, and this is yet another example of our storied history of innovation and technical leadership in this space.”.

The new technology fills a long-standing gap in biomedical research by enabling scientists to more rapidly view and isolate cells with specific, observable traits of interest, which can accelerate discovery research and unlock potential therapies or cures for disease in a broad range of fields such as virology and oncology. 

“This technology represents the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of work from a highly multidisciplinary team of optical, mechanical, electrical, biomedical and software engineers and scientists that aimed to provide researchers a differentiated and flexible capability for analyzing single cells,” said Eric Diebold, worldwide vice president of R&D for BD Biosciences and co-corresponding author of the paper. “We have just scratched the surface of the types of science that will be enabled with this new high-throughput image-based cell sorting technology, and we look forward to how BD and the scientific community at-large will leverage it to advance both basic research and the development of therapeutics.”