Rivercyte - fostering the future of cell analysis through deformability cytometry.
The future of cell analysis.
At Rivercyte, we produce technology for the analysis of physical phenotypes of cells, including their deformability - information largely missing in current biological and medical research. We envision that in the future, insights about the physical phenotype of cells will be informing decisions in clinical practice.
We democratize deformability cytometry. We make it easy-to-use and affordable. This way, we hope to make the technology widely available.
Our Technology
We produce devices and software for the analysis of physical properties of cells, including their stiffness, size, shape and morphological features.
Why do the mechanical properties of cells matter?
Cell mechanics and other physical properties of cells reflect physiological and pathological changes in cell function. They are promising biomarkers for disease diagnosis and prognosis. For example, we recently found dramatic changes of blood cell mechanics during COVID-19.
An HL-60 cell deforming under shear stress in a microfluidic channel. Video by MPL, licensed CC0.
What is physical phenotyping of cells?
Physical phenotyping involves the characterization of single living cells by their physical and morphological features such as size, shape and stiffness. An efficient technique for doing this is deformability cytometry. As a label-free method based purely on brightfield images of cells, deformability cytometry adds a new functional and unbiased dimension to flow cytometry. Combined with machine learning, deformability cytometry is a discovery machine for characterizing cell populations and functional states that are invisible to marker-based techniques.
What is deformability cytometry?
In deformability cytometry, thousands of single cells flow quickly through a narrow microfluidic channel, where the cells deform due to the forces applied. An image of each cell is taken and analyzed. Cell deformability and other parameters describing the cell's physical phenotype are extracted from the image. Thanks to high-speed video microscopy, our analysis rates of 1000 cells per second approach those of conventional fluorescence-based flow cytometers. Hundreds of thousands of cells are measured within minutes.
Scheme of the microfluidic chip used for deformability cytometry. Image by MPL, licensed CC0.
Which samples can be analyzed?
Any cell suspension can be measured with deformability cytometry - blood and other liquid biopsies, cells from solid tissues, and cultured cells. All of this is possible without time- and material-consuming sample preparation such as staining. As such, deformability cytometry supports diverse applications in biology, biotechnology and medicine.
Key publications from our team
- Otto et al., Real-time deformability cytometry: on-the-fly cell mechanical phenotyping. Nature Methods (2015)
- Rosendahl et al., Real-time fluorescence and deformability cytometry. Nature Methods (2018)
- Toepfner et al., Detection of human disease conditions by single-cell morpho-rheological phenotyping of blood. eLife (2018)
- Nawaz, Urbanska and Herbig et al., Intelligent image-based deformation-assisted cell sorting with molecular specificity. Nature Methods (2020)
- Urbanska et al., A comparison of microfluidic methods for high-throughput cell deformability measurements. Nature Methods (2020)
- Kubánková et al., Physical phenotype of blood cells is altered in COVID-19. Biophysical Journal (2021)
- Soteriou and Kubánková et al., Rapid single-cell physical phenotyping of mechanically dissociated tissue biopsies. Nature Biomedical Engineering (2023)
News
Rivercyte wins Phase 1 of the Bavarian Business Plan Competition
2025-02-12Rivercyte has been recognized as one of the winning teams in Phase 1 of the Business Plan Competition Northern Bavaria 2025. This achievement underscores the potential of our technology in the healthcare sector.
Rivercyte founders Jochen Guck and Markéta Kubánková win prestigious awards
2024-12-01We are proud that in 2024 two of our founders received well-deserved recognition of their work: Jochen Guck has been awarded the Greve Prize and Markéta Kubánková received the “For Women in Science” L'Oréal-UNESCO award and the Hermann Neuhaus prize. Congratulations!
Fish oil increases the deformability of white blood cells, boosting immune function
2024-11-02Together with collaborators from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Leibniz University Hannover, and the University of South Dakota, Rivercyte co-founder Martin Kräter found that fish oil supplementation increases the deformability of white blood cells, potentially enhancing immune function by improving their circulation and response to inflammation or infection.
Products
Deformability Cytometry Device and Software
Consumables for Deformability Cytometry
Microgel Beads with Tunable Mechanical Properties
