Protective Polymer Coatings for High-Throughput, High-Purity Cellular Isolation

Cell-based therapies are emerging as the next frontier of medicine, offering a plausible path forward in the treatment of many devastating diseases. Critically, current methods for antigen positive cell sorting lack a high throughput method for delivering ultrahigh purity populations, prohibiting the application of some cell-based therapies to widespread diseases. Here we show the first use of targeted, protective polymer coatings on cells for the high speed enrichment of cells. Individual, antigen-positive cells are coated with a biocompatible hydrogel which protects the cells from a surfactant solution, while uncoated cells are immediately lysed. After lysis, the polymer coating is removed through orthogonal photochemistry, and the isolate has u003e50% yield of viable cells and these cells proliferate at rates comparable to control cells. Minority cell populations are enriched from erythrocyte-depleted blood to u003e99% purity, whereas the entire batch process requires 1 h and u003c$2000 in equipment. Batch scale-u...