
Q&A with Professor Dino Di Carlo
Dino Di Carlo is a professor of bioengineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA Samueli. He is also the chair of the Bioengineering Department and the Armond and Elena Hairapetian Chair in Engineering and Medicine. His research interests span many areas, including microfluidics, lab on a particle, single-cell analysis and cell therapies. He is also an inventor and serial entrepreneur who has made key innovations in biotechnology, co-founding five startup companies across the diagnostic, medical device and therapeutic industries.
“I learned that in order to open the gates of the ivory tower, you had to break those gates down yourself, and that means taking the next step in the journey from technology idea to product idea, and even helping to raise the capital to start the next chapter.”
Q. What are some of the main research projects that you are focusing on in 2024-2025?
A. With the support of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), we have a big focus this year on developing “lab on a particle” technologies. Imagine shrinking down a laboratory such that hundreds of separate microscale reactions can occur on the head of a pin. In essence, we are scaling down reactions in small cavity-containing polymer particles we call nanovials and picoshells, and then scaling out so we can perform hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of reactions in a day. A challenge arises when you try to watch or analyze the result of these reactions, which we often perform on single cells that fit into each of these particles. So we leverage commercial lab instruments designed to analyze individual cells to measure and sort these reactions at extreme speeds. An example application for this technology is identifying cancer-reactive immune cells that can be mined to identify recognition molecules that make these immune cells effective in killing tumor cells, and can be used to develop better anti-cancer therapies.
Q. How do you work with undergraduate and graduate students on these research projects?
A. I mentor and have scheduled meetings with each of the graduate students in the lab on a regular basis. Our senior graduate students lead their own projects as part of this general theme, either developing some of the technology fundamentals or exploring new applications of the technology. I encourage and facilitate collaborations within our team and with other labs. Our senior students help to train our junior students on the techniques of the lab, so that the junior students can use that as a jumping-off point for new projects. Graduate students are also expected to mentor undergraduate students to help them progress in developing skills in scientific techniques, but also in experiment design, and even thinking about the big picture of their projects. We have 15 graduate students in the lab and they are training and mentoring more than 20 undergraduate students at any given time.
Q. How will your research be translated into new technologies?
A. We are always framing our work in terms of what is needed in the market and, because some of our work is health-related, this connects to a clinical need. For example, one of the first technologies developed by our lab, deformability cytometry, which enabled rapid measurement of the mechanical stiffness of cells, was applied to diagnose the immune activation of a patient with sepsis. The technology fit this need perfectly, since it could make rapid measurements without looking at amplifying biomolecules. This is very important for sepsis, where every hour of delay increases mortality. The technology was licensed to Cytovale, a company I co-founded with my former student Henry Tse, and colleague, Ajay Shah. Cytovale received FDA clearance for its IntelliSepTM test at the end of 2022, and has deployed it to hospital systems across the U.S. this year. Most of the work we do is at the cutting-edge of research that large companies won’t take risks on, so often we have to start our own companies. So far, we’ve started a number of companies from the lab, including Cytovale, Tempo Therapeutics, Forcyte Biotechnologies, Partillion Bioscience, and our most recent startup, Saku Biosciences, founded earlier this year.
Q. How could private funding through donor gifts enable you to further your research at UCLA
A. Because our work is at the cutting-edge of research, we often do not receive funding from more conservative federal funding agencies. Donor gifts and funding, like the funds from CZI, enable us to explore the latest tools, which have high risk, but exponential potential impact. These projects may also be proposed by graduate students based on new collaborations across the department or throughout UCLA, which often take time to fund and lead to delays in groundbreaking research. We would welcome investment in the tools we develop in particular, since we share these widely with researchers across the world to accelerate the pace of research, discoveries and new treatments for everyone.
Q. As the newly appointed Department Chair of the Bioengineering department, could you discuss your key priorities and goals for the department moving forward?
A. We just went through a strategic planning exercise with the department, which highlighted key priorities for us, including recruiting faculty that are leading their fields. This year we plan to recruit four new faculty with focus areas of immunoengineering and AI in bioengineering, such as for protein design. We also aim to level up our graduate students by providing more resources on writing proposals and fellowships, more opportunities to practice communicating their work, and connections with their peers to build independence and start their own projects. Finally, we are doubling down on project-based learning for our undergraduate programs, enabling learning-by-doing, and are excited to develop best practices for incorporating generative AI tools in teaching and learning for our courses.
Q. What inspired your entrepreneurial journey across diagnostics, medical devices and therapeutics? What key insights have you gained about building successful startups in these fields?
A. My entrepreneurial journey to start companies is rooted in my desire to do my best to make sure our work has meaning and impact in the world. I understood early on, through my amazing mentors Luke Lee at UC Berkeley and Mehmet Toner at Harvard Medical School, that papers alone do not lead to patients being diagnosed or treated. I learned that in order to open the gates of the ivory tower, you had to break those gates down yourself, and that means taking the next step in the journey from technology idea to product idea, and even helping to raise the capital to start the next chapter. And that the journey — from idea, to evolving the technology, to a product that serves customers targeting specific pain points — was just as rewarding and interesting. I also realized that those learnings were something valuable that I could teach the next generation of students, so that each time it got easier, faster and more capital-efficient. There are many lessons you learn along the way, but perhaps the most important lesson is to make sure you have the right company on the journey, because it will inevitably be a long one, a harrowing one, and you need folks who you trust and respect to keep making strides when the path is not clear and the end is not in sight.