Brown University team tracks moving cells with an electrical imaging chip

Brown University engineers reported on 8 October 2026 that a chip using electrical measurements tracked moving cells in laboratory tests. Described in a Lab on a Chip study, the method could give researchers another way to observe cell migration, a process studied in cancer spread, wound healing and immune response. Brown’s published account describes tests on cells and tissues; it does not establish a medical use or an improvement in patient outcomes.

The square chip is about 1.3 centimetres on each side and holds an array of one million microscale electrodes. Researchers place cells on its surface in a liquid nutrient solution. As the cells grip the surface and move, their contact changes nearby electrical properties. The device measures small changes in capacitance to distinguish areas touched by cells from uncovered areas, then follows those changes over time.

What the Brown University chip tracked

Brown’s account says the team tracked the movement of human breast cancer cells and captured cell division as it happened. In tests with multicellular spheroids, the chip also recorded cells at the outer edges of clusters beginning to migrate outward. These observations show the device working with individual cells and with groups whose members move in relation to one another.

The researchers also imaged honeycomb tissues made up of hundreds of thousands of cells. According to Brown’s account, the resulting images resolved voids and boundaries as the tissues changed shape. The team says the sensor’s relatively large area may let researchers image large tissues without combining multiple images, a step that can be necessary with optical microscopy. The published account does not provide a measured comparison of image resolution or tracking accuracy against those methods.

Why track cell movement without fluorescent labels?

A separate 2020 study in the Journal of Cell Science supplies context for the imaging problem. Its researchers found that excess illumination during live-cell fluorescence imaging could cause phototoxicity and photobleaching. They used cell migration and mitochondrial morphology as indicators of cell health and described ways to reduce these effects with standard microscope setups. That work supports care in designing optical experiments, but it does not test Brown’s chip or establish that electrical imaging performs better.

Pushkaraj Joshi, another co-first author, said sensing capacitance allows the team to observe migration without labeling and may reduce unwanted experimental artifacts. Co-lead Jacob Rosenstein compared the principle to a fingerprint scanner: differences in capacitance reveal where a surface is touched and where it is not. Brown says the device needs no lenses, light source or other optics, which makes it portable in ways many conventional microscopes are not.

What remains untested for electrical cell imaging

Co-lead Ian Y. Wong said his team could track cells automatically in the capacitance images and found those videos easier to analyze than fluorescence microscopy images that required adjustments to image processing. That is the team’s reported experience, rather than an independently measured comparison across laboratories. The available account gives no quantitative figures for tracking accuracy, spatial or temporal resolution, throughput, or the range of samples the chip can accommodate.

The researchers say the device could be mass-produced fairly inexpensively, but the account gives no production cost or commercial availability. It is also unclear how consistently the method works across other cell types, tissue environments or longer observation periods, and whether other laboratories can reproduce the results. The tests establish a laboratory demonstration of electrical tracking, while its place alongside existing imaging techniques still needs to be determined.