Bioelectronic Sensor with Magnetic Modulation to Quantify Phagocytic Activity of Blood Cells Employing Machine Learning.

Microbial infections result in activating an immune response in the human body, which triggers inflammatory pathways resulting in recognition and subsequent killing of the pathogens. Quantifying the blood cells' natural ability to kill pathogens, i.e., phagocytosis, is critical to demonstrating the effectiveness of an individual's response in combating pathogens. Current laboratory processes and equipment that can be used to monitor phagocytic activity are costly and time-consuming and require significant technical expertise to run such assays. Here, we design and develop a novel biosensing platform capable of quantifying the phagocytic ability of blood cells. The sensor design is composed of electronic sensing and magnetic modulation sub-systems that work in conjunction to monitor phagocytic activity in microfluidic channels. The phagocytes internalize the IgG-coated magnetic beads, and when infused into the sensor, their speed will be modulated using the quadrupole magnetic field configuration as they pass through microfluidic channels where microfabricated electrodes are placed. The electronic sensor will generate the voltage pulse for each passage of the phagocyte, whose distinct features are correlative to the phagocytic activity. We experimentally tested this device using 17 blood samples collected from patients at Robert Wood Johnson Medical Hospital. Further, we developed artificial neural networks (ANN) to improve the accuracy of the phagocytic activity detection. ANN model detected the phagocytic activity with 88.2% accuracy. This novel sensing platform can potentially be used to triage high risk patients and develop personalized theranostics for the septic patients in the future.