Cellular imaging is intended to visualize cells and cellular processes in living organisms and has a high clinical relevance in the early detection of inflammatory processes. An already established cellular imaging method is Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI), which is a non-invasive tomographic method for quantifying magnetic nanoparticles (MNP).

Recently, WG 8.23 developed a procedure for reproducible, magnetic labelling of monocytes [1]. In the first step, the interaction of different cell culture media with the MNP before cell loading was examined to select a suitable cell loading medium. In the second step of the procedure, various preparation steps during and after cell loading were analyzed using magnetic particle spectroscopy (MPS) to determine optimal values ​​for incubation time, iron concentration and washing procedures without affecting cell viability. Subsequently, cells with reproducible loading could be quantified by MPI.

Our systematic investigation of different factors before and after magnetic cell loading facilitates future development of a reliable and reproducible MPI cell imaging method for early detection of inflammation.

[1] A. Remmo et.al. Cell Tracking by Magnetic Particle Imaging: Methodology for Labeling THP-1 Monoocytes with Magnetic Nanoparticles for Cellular Imaging. Cells 11(18):2892, 2022

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