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Faculty Information

John McDevitt, PhD

Professor
New York University College of Dentistry
Biomaterials
433 First Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10010
Phone: +1-212-998-9204
Fax: +1-212-995-4244
E-mail: mcdevitt@nyu.edu

Education

Postdoc, Analytical/Materials Chemistry, University of North Carolina 1988
PhD, Physical/Materials Chemistry, Stanford University 1987
BS, Chemistry/Sensors & Devices, California Polytechnic State University 1982

Proffesional Appointments

  • Chairman, Department of Biomaterials and Biomimetics for NYUCD, January 2015 - March 2020
  • Director, Gulf Coast Consortium Cluster for Early Disease Detection, June 2010 - present
  • Brown-Weiss Professor of Bioengineering and Chemistry, Rice University, July 2009 - present
  • Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering and Chemistry, Rice University, Sept. 2008 - June 2009
  • Adjunct Professor of Clinical Chemistry, University of Texas Medical Branch, Sept. 2005 - present
  • Full Professor, University of Texas at Austin, Inorganic, Analytical and Physical Chemistry Divisions, Sept. 2000 - June 2009
  • Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin, Sept. 1995 - Aug. 2000
  • Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin, July 1989 - Aug. 1995

Accomplishments, Honors, and Awards

  • 2016 Wallace H. Coulter Lecturership Award, Highest Award from AACC
  • Selected as Member of the New York Academy of Medicine
  • Nokia Sensing X Prize Challenge Finalist (2013 and 2014)
  • Outstanding New Faculty Member School of Engineering, Rice Alumni Association (2011)
  • Honored Alumnus Award, College of Science and Mathematics, California Polytechnic State University (2010)
  • Founding Director for the Gulf Coast Consortium Cluster on Early Disease Detection (2010)
  • Founding Director for the Texas Cancer Diagnostics Pipeline (2010)
  • Launched 6 major clinical trials in areas of cardiac heart disease, oral, ovarian and prostate cancers (2010)
  • Selected for NIH Grand Opportunities Award --- 1% pay line (2009)
  • Popular Science's "Best of What's New Award" in Medical Device category (2008)
  • Developed initial saliva bio-nano-chip system for diagnosis of heart attacks (2008)
  • Developed first integrated lab-on-a-chip system for diagnosis of oral cancer (2007)
  • Received one of four awards nationwide from the NIH to participate in a cooperative research program for development of next generation saliva diagnostic devices (2006)
  • Founded new company to distribute and manufacture biochips for use in resource poor settings (2005)
  • Developed new biochip methods for saliva-based diagnostics (2005)
  • Gates grant recipient for HIV monitoring biochips for use in Africa (2004)
  • Developed HIV monitoring biochips for use in resource poor settings (2003)
  • Developed new methods for rapid bacteria-spore detection (2002)
  • Developed initial cardiac risk factors chip (2002)
  • Taste chip research facilitated the award and creation of two new sensor centers at UT (1998): Beckman Center for Chemical Sensors & Army Research Office MURI Center for Biological Sensors
  • Taste Chip selected for Science Coalition Best Scientific Advances (1998)
  • Primary inventor of "Taste Chip Technology" (1996)
  • Presidential Young Investigator Award, U.T. Austin (1990-1995)
  • Exxon Education Foundation Award, U.T. Austin (1992)
  • Grace Fellowship, Stanford University (1983-1987)
  • Chemistry Dept. Research Award, California Polytechnic State Univ. (1982)

Research Interests / Professional Overview

Starting January 2015 through March 2020, Dr. John T. McDevitt will served as the new Chairman for the Department of Biomaterials and Biomimetics within New York University's College of Dentistry (NYUCD). McDevitt is a pioneer in the development of tools for affordable and accessible healthcare. He also serves as the Scientific Founder for and Chief Scientific Officer for SensoDx, LLC. His innovations have been awarded Best of What's New in the Medical Device Category in 2008 by Popular Science, Best Scientific Advance of the Year for 1998 by the Science Coalition and Nokia Sensing X Prize Finalist in 2013 and 2014. Over the past 5 years, McDevitt has served as the Principal Investigator and technical lead for 6 major clinical trials involving 10 clinical sites and > 5000 patients. These important translational studies serve to establish strong linkages between new medical microdevice technologies and unmet clinical needs for major diseases including cardiac heart disease, oral cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, drugs of abuse and trauma. Further, McDevitt has established "Texas Cancer Diagnostics Pipeline" and has served as Director for ‘Early Disease Detection Gulf Coast Consortium Cluster' (network of > 100 clinical researchers) devoted to next generation of diagnostic devices.

McDevitt is one of the leading experts in oral diagnostics having served for the last 10 years as the PI for the NIH/NIDCR sponsored U-01 Cooperative Research Agreement and has recently augmented this area to include noninvasive oral cancer screens with sponsorship from the NIH Grand Opportunity Award.

McDevitt and his team have written 185 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and authored >150 patents and patent applications. This work led to one of largest patent portfolios in the history of UT Austin. His individual honors include the Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Exxon Education Award and Honored Alumnus Award, College of Science and Mathematics, and California Polytechnic State University. Over the past decade he has served as the Scientific Founder for several diagnostic companies.

For this program, Dr. McDevitt will help lead a talented international team with the goal of developing and validating new technologies suitable for screening and diagnosis of potentially malignant oral lesions. Through these efforts novel cost-effective screening routines will be introduced using noninvasive brush biopsies that are combined with state-of-the-art 'pathology on a chip' systems. With these new capabilities, it could be possible to move away from late stage disease diagnosis into early stage disease capture. These powerful chip-based tools, along with new diagnostic models, have strong potential to alter in a major ways not only the screening and diagnosis of potentially malignant oral disorders, but also provide new insights into disease progression and allow for the exploration of new field cancerization phenomena in the oral cavity.

Current Funding

Ongoing Research Support

  1. Title: "Texas Cancer Diagnostics Pipeline Consortium"; Source of Support: Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas; Grant Number: RP140024 (Formerly RP101382); Project Duration: 08/01/10 to 02/28/16; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: With collaboration of experts in the fields of Gynecologic Oncology, Oral Medicine and Genitourinary Oncology the McDevitt group aims to develop cost-effective cancer screening devices and diagnostic testing procedures through the adaptation of the bio-nano-chip platform that will move new cancer biomarker research into clinical practice.
  2. Title: "Development of New Chip-Based Sensors for Monitoring of Oral Cancer"; Source of Support: Renaissance Health Service Corporation (Delta Dental); Total Amount: $150,000 Project Duration: 5/1/13 to 6/30/15; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: The development of a minimally-invasive brush biopsy test for oral cancer diagnosis (no scalpel biopsy would be required) that when combined with a novel microchip can be performed in clinics or dentist's offices with results that are available in a matter of minutes (within visit). These funds will be used to complete the validation phase of the ongoing GO clinical trial.
  3. Title: "Development of a Lab-on-a-Chip System for Saliva Based Diagnostics"; Source of Support: National Institutes of Health; Supplement Award (U-01 Mechanism); Project Duration: 08/30/12 to 02/28/15; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: Consistent with the most recent program data which suggests an increase of 300 patients is necessary to achieve the goal of adequate power for 7 marker panel with our current AMI rate, this supplement was granted to cover recruitment of 300 additional patients.
  4. Title: "Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF): Pilot and Prospective Studies for the Development of the 'Trauma Chip': Use of Lab-on-a-Chip and Biomarkers of Trauma for the Diagnosis of Risk for Acute Kidney Failure (ARF)"; Source of Support: University of Texas Health Science Center - Houston; Grant Number: PO #0000461732; Project Duration: 08/04/11 to 08/31/15; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: To investigate the potential of this lab-on-chip NBC technology to assess biomarker changes in urine composition of critically injured trauma patients as a tool for noninvasive identification of patients at risk for acute renal failure.
  5. Title: "Development of the cardiac scorecard to gather biomarker signatures from needlestick quantities of blood and quantify the patient's cardiovascular wellness.": Source of support: BCM/CASIS; Grant Number: 101839713; Project Duration: 07/15/13 - 07/14/15; PI: Clifford Dasco, Co-PI: John T. McDevitt.
  6. Title: "NYU Cardiac Wellness Facility"; Source of Support: NYC Council Capita: Project Duration: September 1, 2015 to August 31, 2017; Principal Investigator: John T. McDevitt; Scope: The Cardiac Wellness Testing facility will be a functioning lab space in addition to processing samples from dentists, nurse practitioners and doctors' offices from around New York City. The goal of establishing this facility is to help launch new cardiac health initiatives whereby health consumers are able to participate more actively in the management of their own cardiovascular care. In addition to cardiologists, dentist and nurse practitioners will be empowered to treat their patients en route to capturing the disease early. NYU would welcome the use of the facility by researchers from all across the city, even those not affiliated with NYU, and it will be accessible at any time providing necessary initial training on the equipment was completed. Clinicians from both inside and outside NYU will be welcomed to ship their samples to the facility. The facility will generate new collaborative opportunities across NYC with goal of making Big Apple more cardio healthy.
  7. Title: "Development and Feasibility of PerioDX for Identification of Periodontal Disease"; Source of Support: National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (SBIR Program); Project Duration: 07/01/15 to 06/30/2016; Principal Investigator: Phyllis Siegel; Scope: The goal of this project is to develop a programmable bio-nanochip diagnostic device technology that uses antibody-coated agarose beads and membrane-based technology in a multiplex format to detect periodontal disease by targeting both microbes and host response biomarkers. This translational research effort is the continuation of a 12-year collaboration of an expert and diverse research team to further develop a next-generation POC diagnostic device for periodontal disease. The goal is to produce a highly reliable, reproducible, accurate and sensitive tool for early detection, screening, and monitoring of periodontal disease that would enable enhanced decision-making regarding treatment. This study is being performed by Innovative Diagnostics Inc. (IDI) and researchers from the University of Kentucky (UK), McDevitt Laboratory (NYU) and SensoDx (Houston, TX).

Recently Completed Research Support

  1. Title: "Monitoring of Oral Cancer Patients Using Novel Lab-on-a-Chip Ensembles"; Source of Support: National Institutes of Health/NIBIB; Administrative Supplement Award; Project Duration: 8/01/12 to 9/30/13; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: This is the second Administrative Supplement that aims at completing the analysis of additional clinical samples expected from New York University.
  2. Title: "A Bio-Nano-Chip for Salivary Anticonvulsant Drug Assay in Epilepsy Patients"; Source of Support: John S. Dunn Research Foundation; Project Duration: 01/01/12 to 12/12/13; PI: Giridhar P. Kalamangalam; Scope: We will adapt the bio-nano-chip technology to develop a portable anticonvulsant assay system that utilizes patient salivary samples. Our goal is to produce a device that that is suitable for frequent domiciliary use by patients themselves, so that potentially hazardous dips in antiepileptic drug concentrations are identified in advance and corrected by dosage adjustment.
  3. Title: "Monitoring of Oral Cancer Patients Using Novel Lab-on-a-Chip Ensembles"; Source of Support: National Institutes of Health/ National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; Project Duration: 9/25/09 to 8/31/11; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: The development of a minimally-invasive brush biopsy test for oral cancer diagnosis (no scalpel biopsy would be required) that when combined with a novel microchip can be performed in clinics or dentist's offices with results that are available in a matter of minutes.
  4. Title: "Monitoring of Oral Cancer Patients Using Novel Lab-on-a-Chip Ensembles"; Source of Support: National Institutes of Health/ National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; Administrative Supplement Award; Project Duration: 8/01/11 to 7/31/12; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: This Administrative Supplement focuses on optimizing the study clinical design by adding two additional sites to this study, the University of Sheffield and New York University.
  5. Title: "Development of a Lab-on-a-Chip System for Saliva Based Diagnostics"; Source of Support: National Institutes of Health; Grant Number: 1U-01 DE017793-01 (U-01 Mechanism); Project Duration: 09/01/06 to 07/31/10; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: The McDevitt group's role for this joint program that spans five research groups is to develop new methods for measurement of saliva-based analytes using microfluidic devices.
  6. Title: "Development of a Lab-on-a-Chip System for Saliva Based Diagnostics"; Source of Support: National Institutes of Health; Administrative Supplement Award (U-01 Mechanism); Project Duration: 09/01/10 to 02/28/12; PI: John T. McDevitt; Scope: This Administrative Supplement focuses on optimizing the clinical study design by incorporating a few aspects which were not considered in the original proposal.

Representative Publications

Complete listing available on the NYU Health Sciences Library site.

Search PubMed for articles.

  1. Shadfan, B.; Simmons, A.; Simmons, G.; Ho, A.; Wong, J.; Lu, K.; Bast, R.; McDevitt, J., A Multiplexable, Microfluidic Platform for the Rapid Quantitation of a Biomarker Panel for Early Ovarian Cancer Detection at the Point-of-Care. Cancer Prevention Research 2015, 8 (1), 42-53.
  2. Speight, P.; Abram, T.; Floriano, P.; James, R.; Vick, J.; Thornhill, M.; Murdoch, C.; Freeman, C.; Hegarty, A.; D'Apice, K.; Kerr, A.; Phelan, J.; Corby, P.; Khouly, I.; Vigneswaran, N.; Bouquot, J.; Demian, N.; Weinstock, Y.; Redding, S.; Rowan, S.; Yeh, C.; McGuff, H.; Miller, F.; McDevitt, J., Interobserver agreement in dysplasia grading: toward an enhanced gold standard for clinical pathology trials. Oral Surgery Oral Medicine Oral Pathology Oral Radiology 2015, 120 (4), 474.
  3. McRae, M. P.; Simmons, G. W.; Wong, J.; Shadfan, B.; Gopalkrishnan, S.; Christodoulides, N.; McDevitt, J. T., Programmable bio-nano-chip system: a flexible point-of-care platform for bioscience and clinical measurements. Lab Chip 2015, 15 (20), 4020-31.
  4. Kulla, E.; Chou, J.; Simmons, G. W.; Wong, J.; McRae, M. P.; Patel, R.; Floriano, P. N.; Christodoulides, N.; Leach, R. J.; Thompson, I. M.; McDevitt, J. T., Enhancement of performance in porous bead-based microchip sensors: effects of chip geometry on bio-agent capture. Rsc Advances 2015, 5 (60), 48194-48206.
  5. Floriano, P.; Abram, T.; Taylor, L.; Le, C.; Talavera, H.; Nguyen, M.; Raja, R.; Gillenwater, A.; McDevitt, J.; Vigneswaran, N., Programmable Bio-Nano-Chip based Cytologic Testing of Oral Potentially Malignant Disorders in Fanconi Anemia. Oral Dis 2015.
  6. John T. McDevitt, Michael P. McRae, Glennon W. Simmons, Nicolaos Christodoulides, "Programmable bio-nano-chip system: a flexible diagnostic platform that learns", Journal of Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2015, Volume 6, Issue 2, 1000e137.
  7. Christodoulides, N.; De La Garza, R., II; Simmons, G. W.; McRae, M. P.; Wong, J.; Newton, T. F.; Smith, R.; Mahoney, J. J., III; Hohenstein, J.; Gomez, S.; Floriano, P. N.; Talavera, H.; Sloan, D. J.; Moody, D. E.; Andrenyak, D. M.; Kosten, T. R.; Haque, A.; McDevitt, J. T., Application of programmable bio-nano-chip system for the quantitative detection of drugs of abuse in oral fluids. Drug and Alcohol Dependence 2015, 153, 306-313.
  8. Miller, C. S., II, J. D. F., Floriano, P. N., Christodoulides, N., Ebersole, J. L., Campbell, C. L.; Kryscio, R. J., McDevitt, J.T. (2014). "Utility of salivary biomarkers for demonstrating acute myocardial infarction". Journal of Dental Research, 2014, 93(7), suppl 72S-79S.
  9. J. Chou, J. Wong, N. Christodoulides, P. N. Floriano, G. W. Simmons, X. Sanchez, J. T. McDevitt, "Porous Bead-Based Diagnostic Platforms: Bridging the Gaps in Healthcare", Sensors, 2012, 12, 15467-15499. DOI:10.3390/s121115467.
  10. J. V. Jokerst, J. W. Jacobson, B. D. Bhagwandin, P. N. Floriano, N. Christodoulides, J. T. McDevitt, "Programmable Nano-Bio-Chip Sensors: Analytical Meets Clinical", Analytical Chemistry, 2010, 82, 1571-1579. DOI: 10.1021/ac901743u.

Additional McDevitt group manuscripts may be found online.