Optical force on diseased blood cells: towards the optical sorting of biological matter

TL;DR

This study uses advanced simulations to analyze how optical forces vary on diseased blood cells, specifically infected red blood cells, to inform potential optical sorting and treatment methods.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed theoretical analysis of optical forces on diseased blood cells, highlighting their dependence on disease stage and illumination wavelength.

Findings

Optical forces vary significantly with disease stage.

Force amplitude changes are in the hundreds of picoNewtons.

Results suggest potential for optical sorting of diseased cells.

Abstract

By employing a series of massively parallel ab-initio simulations, we study how optical forces act on biological matter subject to morphological disease. As a representative case study, we here consider the case of Plasmodium Falciparum on red blood cells (RBC) illuminated by a monochromatic plane wave. Realistic parameters for the geometry and the refractive index are then taken from published experiments. In our theoretical campaign, we study the dependence of the optical force on the disease stage for different incident wavelengths. We show that optical forces change significantly with the disease, with amplitude variation in the hundreds of pN range. Our results open up new avenues for the design of new optical systems for the treatment of human disease.