Di Carlo Lab - 2019 in Review

Season’s Greetings! Continuing the tradition of sharing highlights from the year, 2019 was full of exciting new innovations and developments bringing technologies from the lab to the bedside.

• Point-of-Care Diagnostic for Early Lyme Disease. In collaboration with Aydogan Ozcan, Omai Garner, Raymond Dattwyler, Paul Arnaboldi, and the Bay Area Lyme Biobank we developed a portable vertical flow paper-based assay and smartphone-based reader. The work, published in ACS Nano and highlighted by GenomeWeb, led by Hyou-Arm Joung and Zach Ballard, leveraged machine learning to develop an optimal panel of Borrelia burgdorferi antigens that were compatible with the paper-based format. The test, which costs ~$0.42 and takes ~15 minutes, performed well in comparison with the gold standard testing approach which costs approximately $400 and takes over 24 hours.

• Flowable Microparticle Scaffolds Moving Towards the Clinic. Our Microporous Annealed Particle (MAP) scaffold technology, first introduced in a 2015 paper in Nature Materials, has advanced in 2019. My student, Jaekyung Koh, led work on delivering cells using the scaffold material leading to enhanced cell survival due to the intrinsic microporosity (published in Small). Joe de Rutte and others also developed a massively parallel microfluidic device to manufacture the hydrogel particle building blocks which increases throughput orders of magnitude (published in Advanced Functional Materials). Work in collaboration with Amir Sheikhi, Ali Khademhosseini and others, extends the technology to gelatin methacrylate particles and developed new approaches to lyophilize particles while maintaining function. The MAP technology, being commercialized by Tempo Therapeutics, has already been demonstrated to enable healing in large wounds in a veterinary setting, saving the limbs of a number of dogs.

• Deformability Cytometry for Rapid Sepsis Diagnosis. I presented at AACC on the results of a 500+ patient clinical study using Deformability Cytometry to identify patients with sepsis by analyzing the biophysical properties of leukocytes with a 5 minute test. The initial technology was first published in PNAS in 2012, led by Henry Tse, now CTO of Cytovale, and Danny Gossett. The clinical study was led by Hollis O'Neal in collaboration with Cytovale, which is commercializing the technology. Cytovale received $15M in financing in 2019 including a partnership with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) for $7.4M to bring a early sepsis diagnostic product through FDA clearance.

• Debut of Lab on a Particle Technology. We revealed a new idea for performing "Quantum Assays" using particles with cavities that can hold cells and uniform nanoliter-scale aqueous volumes, all when simply mixed with oil. The idea, which aims to democratize single cell and single molecule assays without the use of microfluidics, has been well-received at international scientific meetings. Joe de Rutte and Vishwesh Shah were selected to give oral presentations at microTAS on their work, with Joe winning the Art in Science Award. Kahlen Ouyang and Ghulam Destgeer's work was selected for a poster prize at the Materials Research Society (MRS) annual meeting. Stay tuned for a number of papers coming out in 2020 based on this new paradigm.