Our innovation: The fTT biomarker

ICOVELL’s technology combines millifluidic, videomicroscopy and data processing by machine learning. ICOVELL’s innovation is to use the movement of red blood cells subjected to shear stress in a flow to determine their deformability. At a given shear stress, there is a critical threshold of deformability above which the movement of a red blood cell is that of a fluid drop and below which its movement is that of a solid. In fluid drop behaviour, the orientation of the red blood cell is fixed and the membrane of the red blood cell rotates on itself (‘tank-treading’ motion, TT). In solid behaviour, the orientation of the red blood cell changes over time, and it behaves like a coin (‘tumbling’ movement). The measurement represents the fraction of red blood cells performing a Tank-Treading (TT) movement: this is the deformability marker called fTT.

A membrane element is represented on the schematic by a yellow dot. In tank-treading (TT) motion, the cell orientation is fixed and the membrane rotates on itself. In the tumbling motion the cell behaves as a flipping coin, the membrane remains fixed.

Our Scientific publications

  • Dynamics of individual red blood cells under shear flow: a way to discriminate deformability alterations. Atwell, S., Badens, C., Charrier, A., Helfer, E., & Viallat, A. Frontiers in Physiology, 12, 2406 (2022). https ://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffphys.2021.775584
  • Classification of red cell dynamics with convolutional and recurrent neural networks : a sickle cell disease case study. Darrin, M., Samudre, A., Sahun, M., Atwell, S., Badens, C., Charrier, A., … & Giffard-Roisin, S. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 745 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-27718-w
  • Patent: Méthode et dispositif de détermination de la déformabilité de globule rouge. Annie Viallat, Emmanuèle Helfer, Catherine Badens, Scott Atwell et Anne Charrier. EP3821241 B1, US20220341919 A1