Project Results

When a healthy person suffers from a cut or a burn, immune system cells rush to the damaged area to repair. One of the most important of these defenders is the neutrophil — a type of white blood cell that moves quickly to gobble up bacteria that can cause infection. One of the greatest challenges in helping patients recover from infection is that we still don’t understand how our own immune cells do this effectively, why these immune cells sometimes fail, and how to improve the immune response. So last year, my colleagues and I had a novel idea: what if we created a contest, a cellular race, where top scientists from the US and Europe competed to design a new, super-cell that could be faster and smarter than all cells used in the lab? Our results showed that not only could we engineer a better cell, but that this contest approach helped spread new techniques and knowledge. The winners from the first ever Dicty cell race demonstrated new techniques that could improve developments in treating burn victims, infectious disease, and cancer.

About This Project

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Every cell in the body moves. Sometimes, cell movement helps
preserve our health. For example, neutrophils protect us against infections by moving quickly from blood into the wounds. Other times, cell movement is a problem. For example, neutrophils can exacerbate the pain and tissue destruction when they enter joint tissues during arthritis. Cancer cells can give rise to distant metastases, which are the cause of death in 90% of the cancer patients, when they leave a tumor. Considering the importance of cell movement in health and disease, one would think that we already have many drugs to accelerate or slow down cells movement, depending on the circumstances. However, this is hardly the case. Today, we know a lot about the molecules involved in cell movement. However, we understand less about how these molecules work together. Thus, the more we learn about how to speed up moving cells, the better we understand the mechanisms of cell migration, and better the chances that such drugs will eventually emerge.

What is the significance of this project?

One of our goals is to correct the slower and disoriented
neutrophils from patients with burn injuries. However, human neutrophils are very difficult to study using traditional molecular biology tools. It is much easier to study one of the two model cells, Dicty and HL60. Why this is, you could read more in our lab notes. Enabled by microfluidic devices designed in our lab, very precise measurements of speed and orientation are now possible. Compared to the neutrophils from healthy persons, Dicty cells shine in precision but lag in speed, whereas HL60s are good sprinters but lag in precision. These deficits are comparable to those of the neutrophils from patients with large burn injuries. Thus, we have asked scientists around the world to take a first shot at this problem and send us their fastest and smartest Dicty and HL60 cells.

What are the goals of the project?

At the end of the Race we will have in our hands Dicty and HL60 cells that are the fastest and smartest . These cells will be the starting point for a reverse-engineering process that will ultimately lead to new ways to correct the motility of human neutrophils in conditions when their performance is deteriorated and the body looses the ability to fight infections.

Twenty teams of scientists signed up for the Race. Half of them are from the US, half from Europe. You could read more about these teams in our lab notes.

Right now, the teams are working hard to fine tune their cells through preliminary runs using devices that we shipped to their labs. On the day of the Race, May 16, 2014, we will run these cells through mazes and post movies online for everyone to see who will be the winners!