For bioengineer Dino Di Carlo, invention is inseparable from practice. A professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, he moves fluidly between the worlds of discovery, translation and entrepreneurship — and back again.
Among his most recent success stories is the nanovial, a microscopic bowl-shaped hydrogel container that can quickly sort and capture single, living cells in the laboratory. These tiny, engineered vials — smaller than the width of a human hair — allow scientists to select and analyze millions of individual cells and the compounds they secrete more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of existing technologies, potentially speeding advances in areas like biological research, drug discovery and diagnostics.
Microscopic, bowl-shaped hydrogel containers called nanovials (the larger, reddish-brown objects) allow researchers to trap cells and the compounds they secrete (shown here in blue).
“We saw the importance of making single-cell–sized test tubes. We wanted the techniques to be easy, accessible, democratized — something any lab could use. That was the chance to have a really big impact.” says Di Carlo, UCLA’s Armond and Elena Hairapetian Professor of Engineering and Medicine and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.
In developing the technology, Di Carlo drew on his expertise in microfluidics — creating microscale channels to confine reactions within tiny droplets — and the ingenuity of his graduate student, Joseph de Rutte. A proof of concept quickly attracted attention from industry, signaling that the technology was ready to move beyond the academic lab, and they launched a company, Partillion Bioscience, to commercialize it.
At the California NanoSystems Institute’s Magnify incubator, Di Carlo and De Rutte refined and scaled the technology. The nanovials grew smaller, fabrication faster and production easier, aided by the campus’s analytical resources. Today, Partillion operates off campus, shipping billions of nanovials to research groups around the world.
Yet for Di Carlo, commercialization is not the end of the story. The technology continues to open doors to fundamental science. Collaborating across disciplines, he and his colleagues have used nanovials to explore questions that once seemed out of reach — from identifying genes that drive antibody production and testing stem cell therapies for heart repair to challenging long-held assumptions about the genetic instructions that prompt cells to secrete therapeutic proteins.
“When we started linking secretion and gene expression, it opened up a whole new way of thinking about how cells behave,” he says. “It made me question my own assumptions.”
Looking forward, Di Carlo and collaborators are applying nanovials to house not one cell but two, allowing scientists to study the conversations between cells that underpin diseases like cancer, autoimmunity and fibrosis.
Partillion is only one chapter in his entrepreneurial journey. Having co-founded five other companies, Di Carlo views invention and translation as core to his mission.
“A doctor has a practice, and so does an engineer,” he said. “Part of my practice is to build products. I learn, and it feeds back into my research to make the next products even more impactful.”
Nanovials are hydrogel particles that act as millions of suspendable wells for individual cells. They are made from engineered biomaterials that can be easily modified with different biomolecules such as antibodies and antigens. Nanovials are sized just larger than a cell (holding less then a nanoliter of volume) allowing single-cell isolation and improved sensitivity for biomolecule detection.
