About her Postdoctoral project

The diagnosis of immune defaults and the design of immune therapies suffer from a lack of quantitative tools to characterize the multiple and complex steps of immune responses. In particular, fast monitoring of immune cell activation would permit rapid assessment of infectious, autoimmune, or cancerous risks. We recently validated a prototypic method to analyze phenotypically and at single cell level the activation of leukocytes from a drop of patient blood. The method, currently considered for a patent, is based on multiprotein micropatterning with micron size resolution. The generated smart substrates have multiple specific functions towards lymphocytes, such as selection, capture, activation and read-out. Rapidity and automatization of the method, together with access to the kinetics of activation at single cell level are key assets to shed new light on physiopathologic questions and to offer new diagnosis opportunities for acute pathologies. We propose here to develop and apply such innovative tools to the cases of sepsis, malaria and immunotherapy treatments.