How to Wiretap a Billion Cells, with Dino Di Carlo

What happens when scientists come together and realize they didn’t have the data to back up their assumptions?Dino Di Carlo, my guest on this week’s Ion Genomics podcast, shares how he reacted when he found out that there were huge gaps in understanding how individual cells communicate with each other. To remedy this, he has proposed a project to analyze a billion cells, largely in two-cell dyads. He published a paper outlining his vision in Nature Biotechnology. His idea leverages two sequencing technologies. One is proximity sequencing (Prox-seq), a method developed at the University of Chicago that offers information on proteins near each other on top of standard single-cell transcriptomics. Another, developed in Di Carlo’s lab and being commercialized by a company he cofounded, is nanovials, a cell capture method that enables the analysis of cell dyads using popular single-cell sequencing techniques. The tech is being commericalized by Partillion Bioscience, a company Di Carlo cofounded.Di Carlo spoke to me from Japan, where he’s spending the summer setting up a satellite lab, in large part to find stability after he was denied access to grant funding his lab had been awarded as part of the Trump Administration’s conflict with major research universities. Stay tuned to the end for his recommendations on the most underrated sushi types on the menu.