Science Daily, April 4, 2007 A Sandia National Laboratories research team led by Anup Singh is taking a new approach to studying how immune cells respond to pathogens in the first few minutes and hours of exposure. Sandia optical tweezer designer Thomas Perrod assists biologist Meiye Wu with sorting of macrophage cells in microfluidic devices using MISL technology. Their method looks at cells one at a time as they start trying to fight the invading pathogens. Called the Microscale Immune Studies Laboratory (MISL) Grand Challenge, the work is in its second of three years of funding by the internal Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. Sandia is partnering on the project with the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).