Forcyte Biotechnologies
Discover drugs that control how much cells "squeeze" to treat disease
In a nutshell: many diseases are caused by how much your cells squeeze (asthma, fibrosis, others). We discover drugs that control how much cells squeeze, with ease, to treat disease. We use patented bioMEMS technology to turn cell strength (cells' ability to pull/ squeeze) into a quantifiable metric in drug discovery, to help find better drugs for mechanical diseases. We screen 100,000s of drugs against numerous contractile human cell types to comprehensively map human mechanobiology (the "contractome") and identify promising drug development starting points to deliver novel medicines to treat mechanically-driven diseases including asthma, hypertension, preterm labor, fibrosis, and others.
Active Founders
Ivan Pushkarsky
CEO and Co-founder of Forcyte which is based on my PhD work at UCLA with co-founder and PhD Advisor, Prof. Dino Di Carlo. Worked on tech since 2013, lead-authored multiple publications including Nature BME, and lead commercialization by winning SBIR grants, securing tech transfer and building early team.
Dino Di Carlo
Dino Di Carlo is a Professor, inventor, and entrepreneur with >50 issued patents. He is the Armond and Elena Hairapetian endowed chair in Engineering and Medicine at UCLA. His academic research has focused at the interface of micro & nanosystems, data science, and the ultimate limits of biology (single cells and molecules). Over the last 10 years, Dr. Di Carlo co-founded seven startup companies in life science research tools, diagnostics, medical device, and pharmaceutical industries.
