How Lucira Commercialized the First At-Home COVID-19 Test

QB3 at UCSF accelerates life science innovation and entrepreneurship.

About the Speakers

Debkishore Mitra is co-founder of Lucira Health, Inc., whose mission is to develop the next generation diagnostic platforms that will take disease diagnostic out of central labs and into the hands of the patients/users.

He graduated with a PhD from the Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and UC San Francisco. His dissertation focus was on the development of microfluidic tools to aid in the point-of-care tumor-based diagnosis of cancer. He earned his undergraduate degree in biotechnology and biochemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

John Waldeisen is CEO & co-founder of Lucira Health, a company developing the next generation of rapid DNA diagnostic tests for infectious disease testing. For the past 10 years, John has worked in the research & development of point-of-care diagnostic devices that enable the rapid detection of infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, TB, influenza, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and neglected diseases like schistosomiasis, among others. This work is part of an endeavor to alleviate the health disparities that are prevalent in our world by minimizing the role of the clinical laboratory via cheap diagnostic tools. John has 10 publications in peer-reviewed journals, 7 filed patents and pending patent applications, and co-authored more than $6.5M in diagnostic grants funded by the NIH, NSF, Gates Foundation, and DARPA. John graduated summa cum laude from Penn State University and received his PhD in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley.