AIEgen-Lipid Conjugate for Rapid Labeling of Neutrophils and Monitoring of Their Behavior.

Studies on neutrophil-based nanotherapeutic engineering have shown great potentials in treating infection and inflammation disorders. Conventional neutrophil labeling methods are time-consuming and often result in undesired contamination and activation since neutrophils are terminal-differentiated cells with a half-life span of only 7 h. A simple, fast, and biocompatible strategy to construct engineered neutrophils is highly desirable but remains difficult to achieve. In this study, we present an AIEgen-lipid conjugate, which can efficiently label harvested neutrophils in 30 s with no washing step required. This fast labeling method does not affect the activation and transmigration property of neutrophils, which has been successfully used to monitor neutrophil behaviors such as the chemotaxis process and migrating function towards inflammation sites both in vitro and in vivo, offering a tantalizing prospect for neutrophil-based nanotherapeutics studies.