Immune Cell Phenotyping: Cell Surface Architecture Informs Disease Biology

The biophysical properties of the plasma membrane actively shape immune cell function, providing key insights into chronic disease and immune dysfunction. Measuring membrane order across immune cell populations can reveal functionally distinct cell states invisible to canonical surface markers and open new avenues for therapeutics.

In this GEN webinar, Erdinc Sezgin, PhD, Karolinska Institutet, will present how his lab profiled plasma membrane order across 12 immune cell subtypes simultaneously in healthy donors and patients with long COVID and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He will also share how sorting NK cells by membrane order, combined with transcriptomics and the Proximity Network Assay (PNA) from Pixelgen Technologies, uncovered distinct subsets differing in cytotoxic potential, migratory capacity, and surface protein organization for biomedical applications.

Key takeaways include:

• How plasma membrane order varies across immune cell types in chronic disease
• Using biophysical membrane order to identify NK cell subsets that cannot be distinguished by surface markers alone
• How spatial surface proteomics via PNA separates functionally distinct NK cell populations
• How membrane order profiling can complement standard immunophenotyping workflows

A live Q&A session will follow the presentation offering you a chance to pose questions to our expert panelists.

Produced with support from: