Dino Di Carlo
University of California Los Angeles, USA
2022

Dr. Di Carlo is a world leader in applying micro & nanotechnology to biomedical problems, pioneering fields including inertial microfluidics, at-home diagnostics, mechanomedicine, and lab- on-a-particle technologies. Dino was the first to develop approaches to use fluid inertia in microfluidic systems to manipulate particles, cells, and fluids in precise ways (PNAS 2007, cited 1599 times). A number of companies have licensed his inertial microfluidic technology to separate cells for cell therapies, to sort sperm based on chromosome content for animal husbandry, or to perform image-based cytometry at high rates. Dino has also been a pioneer in developing diagnostic devices.

Dino has been Scientific Advisor for Cue Health for the last decade, since it started. Cue was the first to have a molecular diagnostic test authorized by the US FDA for at home use, and is providing point-of-care nucleic acid amplification tests for COVID-19 broadly, with over $600M in sales in 2021. Dino also developed microfluidic approaches to quantify single cell mechanics at high rates to diagnose disease. This purely physical approach is perfectly suited to rapidly measure immune state in sepsis patients, where every hour saves lives (PNAS 2012 – cited 693 times, Science Transl Med 2013). Building off of this work, Cytovale, a company he cofounded, has developed a product to diagnose immune activation associated with sepsis that recently completed a 600-patient clinical trial and will be submitted to the FDA for clearance. He developed another technology, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering in 2018, to measure the force applied by hundreds of thousands of cells in a well-plate format suitable for laboratory automation. This accelerated > 1000-fold the information obtained from experiments compared to previous research, and Forcyte Biotechnologies, a company he co-founded, is establishing the first atlas of proteins and drugs that affect cell force in numerous different human cell types