原子力显微镜(AFM)的出现为免标记研究近生理环境下单个活体状态细胞的机械特性提供了新的技术手段.自20世纪90年代中期以来,研究人员在利用AFM测量细胞机械特性方面开展了大量研究,结果表明细胞机械特性是一个新的免标记生物标志物(可有效指示细胞生理状态的变化),加深了人们对癌症等重大疾病的认识,促进了细胞生物力学的发展.然而,现有的AFM单细胞机械特性研究主要集中在体外培养的细胞系,由于体内体外环境的巨大差异导致测量结果难以完全反映人体内的真实情况.特别是在精准医疗时代,需要对来自患者的原代细胞进行测试分析以实现疾病的个性化诊治.因此发展直接对临床患者原代细胞(癌变细胞和正常细胞)机械特性进行. ; The advent of atomic force microscopy (AFM) provides a novel instrument for label-free measuring the mechanical properties of single living cells under near-physiological conditions. Since the mid-1990s, researchers have used AFM to investigate the mechanical properties of cells with impressive results and demonstrated that cell mechanics is a new label-free biomarker which can effectively indicate the changes of cellular physiological states, improving our understanding of cancers and simultaneously promoting the development of cell biomechanics. However, current AFM single-cell mechanical assays are commonly performed on cell lines cultured in vitro. Due to the huge difference between in vitro and in vivo environments, the results acquired from cell lines cannot completely reflect the real situations in the body. Especially in the era of precision medicine, we need to test and analyze the primary cells from patients to achieve personalized diagnosis and treatment. Hence, developing methods that can directly detect the mechanical properties of primary cells (cancerous cells and normal cells) from clinical patients is of potential significance in translational medicine. In this paper, based on the authors’ own research in applying AFM to measure and characterize the mechanical properties of lymphoma patient cells, the principle and method of measuring the mechanical properties of cells by AFM is presented, then the recent progress in measuring the mechanical properties of primary cells by AFM is summarized, and finally the challenges are discussed.