The Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic at UC Irvine is celebrating its 40th year, marking four decades of transforming scientific concepts into patient treatments. The institute, known for bringing together laser physicists, cell biologists, engineers, and practicing doctors, officially opened its doors in 1986.
The vision for this collaborative environment originated with Michael Berns, a UC Irvine cell biologist. Berns, who arrived at the university in 1972, had a history of pioneering laser applications, including performing the first-ever surgery on a single chromosome. In 1980, after building the Laser Microbeam Program—a machine capable of firing a tunable laser beam at living cells—Berns invited biotech and medical company CEOs in Orange County to see it. Only one person attended: Arnold O. Beckman, then 80 years old and the inventor of the pH meter. Beckman was captivated by Berns’ work and, in 1982, provided the investment that would fund the institute's building.
Elliot Botvinick, a UC Irvine professor who trained under Berns, notes that the institute’s design, combining a medical clinic with biology and engineering labs in a single facility, was ahead of its time. This structure was intended to accelerate the transition of lab inventions to patient care. Berns served as the founding director and maintained a significant influence until his death in August 2022 at age 79. His research has been cited more than 26,000 times, and he received UC Irvine’s highest honor in 1994.
One of the institute’s notable early successes is the Dynamic Cooling Device. In the early 1990s, Dr. J. Stuart Nelson, along with researcher Thomas Milner and visiting engineer Lars Svaasand, sought to improve laser treatments for port-wine birthmarks. The challenge was to deliver laser energy strong enough to treat the birthmark without damaging the delicate skin above it. The solution emerged during a dinner conversation, inspired by the use of numbing spray for sports injuries.
By the following Monday, Milner and Svaasand had acquired components from an auto parts store—a fuel injector valve, a hose clamp, and air conditioning coolant—to build a prototype. The three men tested the device on their own arms to refine its timing. The resulting device attaches to a laser and sprays a burst of freezing mist onto the skin milliseconds before the laser pulse, protecting the surface without cooling the underlying blood vessels. Patented in 1998 and licensed to Candela Laser Corp., this technology is now standard equipment on more than 47,000 medical lasers globally. Between 2001 and 2010, it was among the University of California’s top 10 earning inventions, generating millions in royalties for UC Irvine. Dr. Nelson has since used it to treat over 20,000 port-wine birthmark patients.
Bruce Tromberg, who joined Berns’ lab in 1988 and directed the Beckman Laser Institute for 15 years starting in 2003, further expanded its influence. Under his leadership, the institute was recognized by the National Institutes of Health as a national resource center, allowing outside researchers to utilize its equipment. Tromberg’s own research produced a handheld device that scans breast tissue for cancer signs without a biopsy, analyzing a tumor’s chemical signature through the skin. This device was tested at five hospitals nationwide, including UC San Francisco Medical Center, and was later licensed to a Bay Area company. In 2018, Tromberg was appointed to lead the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, marking the first time a director from the Beckman Laser Institute had moved to lead a national agency. Tromberg, who holds roughly two dozen patents and co-founded a biophotonics company, returned to Irvine on October 8 for the institute's 40th anniversary celebration as the featured speaker. He stated, “Beckman Laser Institute has impacted so many different UC Irvine programs over the decades.”
Today, the institute continues to pursue new advancements under its current researchers. Bernard Choi, a biomedical engineering professor, is set to become the institute’s permanent director in 2026. He currently leads a $7.2 million Department of Defense project focused on light-based diagnostics for battlefield medicine, aiming to detect injuries without needles or scans. His lab also develops wearable sensors for monitoring vital signs in extreme conditions, and one of his inventions assists physicians in preventing amputations for diabetic patients.
Other investigators are developing their own breakthroughs. Zhongping Chen works on scanning technology for non-invasive views inside the eye and heart. Elliot Botvinick uses laser "tweezers" to study how cancer and wounds develop at the cellular level. Mihaela Balu has created a scanner, now nearing clinical trials, that can detect skin cancer at the cellular level without a biopsy. Petra Wilder-Smith developed a camera that significantly improves the accuracy of oral cancer detection, a disease with survival rates that have seen little improvement in decades. These ongoing projects demonstrate the continued application of the institute's founding principles to new medical challenges.
