Size Really Does Matter: Biological Nanoparticles Are Changing Biomedicine

Join us for Size Really Does Matter: Biological Nanoparticles Are Changing Biomedicine, an event on Tue, Dec. 9, 2025 at 7pm at Covalent Metrology, 925 Thompson Place, Sunnyvale, CA 94085. (Also available via Zoom - see https://californiaconsultants.org/event/size-really-does-matter-biological-nanoparticles-are-changing-biomedicine/)

We'll have free quality pizza and drinks starting at 6:30pm. Come early and network with our members, other engineers, interested parties, and possible consulting clients. A Zoom option for this hybrid event is at www.CaliforniaConsultants.org

The holy grail of medical diagnostics is a test that is accurate, sensitive, non-invasive, and inexpensive. For solid tumors such as pancreatic cancer and for many neurological diseases, current diagnostics come too little, too late.

An exciting direction of research in this field relates to exosomes, tiny biological nanoparticles around 100 nm in size. There are trillions of them in our body, carrying a massive amount of valuable information about the health—or disorder—of our organs. They are, however, so small that they had eluded detection until quite recently.

In this talk, Dr. Giacomo Vacca will discuss the challenges, and the promise, of exosomes in biomedical diagnostics. He will show how their abundance is a fantastic opportunity to use them as biomarkers—if you can detect them. As the attention of both technologists and researchers has focused on them, new tools have emerged, enabling new scientific findings—and the tantalizing possibility of much more powerful biomedical diagnostics.

Giacomo Vacca, Ph.D., earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in physics from Harvard University and a doctorate in applied physics from Stanford University. With Nobel Prize winner Bob Laughlin, he developed a novel ultrafast light-scattering technique for his dissertation. He has set up entire laboratories from scratch, started and led development programs, and generated intellectual property, with 110 patent applications and 82 patents issued or allowed to date. He has also led diverse interdisciplinary groups and managed IP portfolios.

At Abbott Labs, Vacca invented and developed Laser Rastering, a radically innovative concept in flow cytometry that increased the rate of cell analysis by a factor of 30. In 2010, he founded Kinetic River, a biophotonics design and product development company focused on particle analysis. Since 2017, Kinetic River has been awarded six competitive Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health, totaling about $8M, to help develop innovative flow cytometry technologies. Kinetic River’s customers include the National Cancer Institute at the NIH, the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Italy’s National Research Council, leading academic institutions like UC Davis, and enterprises from startups to Fortune 500 companies. The latest product launched is the Delaware Flow NanoCytometer, a nanoparticle and cell analyzer with exquisite sensitivity.

In 2013, Vacca co-founded BeamWise, a provider of optical system design tools, acquired in 2023 by Design Power. He is a past Abbott Research Fellow and a senior member of both SPIE and Optica, and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of BioPhotonics magazine.