CHAPTER 7: Application in Single-cell Functional Analysis

Decades of research and clinical trials have proven that cancer immunotherapy has become the most promising treatment for cancer since the first development of chemotherapy and radiation. High throughput screening of rare antigen-specific B cells or T cells from millions to billions of cell repertoires is essential to accelerate drug discovery for immunotherapeutic applications. This chapter reviews applications of droplet microfluidic technology in single-cell functional analysis to speed up rare target cell screening, its unique advantages compared to traditional single-cell analysis tools, and the challenges that remain to be overcome to facilitate the commercialization of this technology.