Optoelectronic Tweezers for Digital Cell Biology

Recent success of immunotherapy has generated tremendous excitements in
the last few years. The remarkable recovery of former President Jimmy
Carter was widely reported. Immunotherapy uses the monoclonal antibodies
or engineered white blood cells to boost patients’ immune response to
fight cancers. The discovery and production of such “biological drugs”
require efficient screening, analysis, and engineering of a large number
of individual white blood cells. In this talk, I will discuss an
optofluidic technology developed at Berkeley several years ago called
“optoelectronic tweezers” (OET). OET enables massively parallel cloning
of single cells in sub-nanoliter compartments in a microfluidic chip.
Antibodies produced by individual cells can be measured in hours. The
fully automated OET instruments are now helping pharmaceutical
industries speed up drug discovery and production process.