Why Does Medicine Need Microtechnology?
Sensing and manipulating biology at its ultimate “quantum” limits, by using single cells and single molecules, is poised to revolutionize medical diagnostics, transform our capabilities to develop drugs and cell therapies, and accelerate engineering of biological solutions to food and energy sustainability. Micro and nanotechnologies designed to operate at micrometer length scales are uniquely suited to sense and manipulate single cells and single molecules, allowing us to solve current problems in health and medicine.
How the Di Carlo Lab Plays a Role
The Di Carlo Lab leverages microfluidics, microfabrication, and nanotechnologies to develop interfaces with cells and molecules for applications in disease diagnosis, therapeutic discovery, tissue regeneration, and directed evolution. These tools not only excel at the manipulation and analysis of single cells and molecules, but also are cost-effective and easily accessible -- thus democratizing advanced biotechnology capabilities to solve medical problems.
109
Publications
15,119
Citations
32
Patents
5
Startups
Startup Culture
Meet the Professor
Dr. Dino Di Carlo is a world-renowned UCLA professor, inventor, and serial entrepreneur who has made key innovations in biotechnology. He has co-founded 5 startup companies across diagnostic, medical device, and therapeutic industries.
Recently, he recognized a gap in the ability to widely deliver breakthrough therapeutics and diagnostics due to current specialized technologies requiring entirely new and costly infrastructure. To address this barrier, he is leveraging the ability to control fluids and chemistry precisely at the microscale level in order to develop low cost reagent platforms compatible with an installed base of instruments already present in laboratories around the world, thus placing all of the assay complexity into a self-contained smart "lab-on-a-particle."
Notable Alumni
Henry Tse
Chief Technology Officer
Cytovale, Inc
"Dino is a dream PI. Purposeful science, patient when the experiments don't go as planned, and encouraging when the data takes you another direction."
Hamed Amini
Group Lead
Grail Inc
Soojung Claire Hur
Clare Booth Luce Assistant Professor
Johns Hopkins University
"Dino is a fantastic mentor who empowers his students to achieve their greatest potentials. He continuously guides them to unravel interesting and impactful scientific questions while providing enough freedom for creativity to spark. I witnessed that in the process each lab member would find their unique research style while accumulating great confidence in their abilities as a scientist."
"The mentorship from Dino and the team Di Carlo transformed me from an engineer focusing on how to make things work to an innovator remembering why we are trying to make things work."
Most Recent Paper
Nature Communications (2024)
Koo D, Cheng X, Udani S, Baghdasarian S, Zhu D, Li J, Hall B, Tsubamoto N, Hu S, Ko J, Cheng K, Di Carlo D
