People Editor
As technology and scientific discoveries advance, so does medicine’s ability to diagnose and treat various conditions. Maddalena Di Piazza is part of the Sunnyvale company Cepheid, which is at the forefront of bringing diagnostic tests everywhere.
Di Piazza, now a research and design systems engineer at Cepheid, began at the company as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, volunteering in an HIV lab. Di Piazza volunteered within the clinical trials of a new HIV vaccine, although she quickly found she preferred earlier stages of clinical trials. So, she took a position at the Baker Lab, within the Institute of Protein Design at the University of Washington. There, she worked under David Baker, who, with two other employees from Google, created a computer model that could predict a protein structure based on its amino acid code. The complex interactions between amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, make predicting a synthetic protein’s shape and function unreliable and difficult. Their code has revolutionized molecular biology, accelerating drug discovery, the development of new treatments, and the understanding of diseases. In terms of her role in the project, Di Piazza explained, “My job was to synthesize these proteins and look at their structure and mass, and feed that back into the database to help the model predict better.” Baker, along with his Google associates, went on to win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing the AI model, AlphaFold.
After earning her master’s degree in Bioengineering, Di Piazza took a position at Cepheid, where she now works, ensuring that upcoming projects are safe and reliable to use, no matter the conditions. Cepheid has been involved with diagnosing tuberculosis, respiratory infections, and emerging infectious diseases, among other maladies. Di Piazza conducts trials to prepare each diagnostic test that Cepheid is developing for the expensive standardized clinical trials that assess their safety and effectiveness. About the impact of her work, she reflected, “I think it’s been really monumental in places like the third world, where we work a lot with tuberculosis diagnosis. These are places where you might not have a full hospital or power all the time. But we can still give you a diagnosis, and you can walk home that day with the care and the medicine that you need.” She ensures the intuitiveness of each design, while also guaranteeing the test will function anywhere in the world, even without stable power sources and full hospital equipment. These features make Cepheid’s designs crucial for fighting diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV within developing nations.
As the battle for reliable and safe healthcare advances around the globe, Di Piazza is optimistic: “I hope that diagnostics can be democratized and brought to the people who really need them.”
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