Every day, 22 people die waiting for an organ transplant. Darrin Carrico (HHS’90) is trying to change that unacceptable statistic.

Carrico graduated with a degree in restaurant, hotel, and institutional management, with an emphasis on business, but realized six months after graduating that his passion lay elsewhere. “I had an entrepreneurial bent, but I wanted to do something meaningful,” he says. So Carrico took a job with a home health care company, and when they offered him a promotion, he relocated to Phoenix from Indianapolis.

Over the next two decades, Carrico worked in health care business development, sales, management, and strategic planning, eventually leading the successful acquisition of an infusion company and serving as vice president of transplant services at one of the nation’s largest specialty pharmacies. “You’ve got your CVS and your Walgreens, and then you have pharmacies that manage complicated transplant, cancer, and neurology patients,” explains Carrico.

“I had an entrepreneurial bent, but I wanted to do something meaningful.”

—Darrin Carrico

In 2011, he decided to strike out on his own. “After years of working deeply with cutting-edge transplant centers and becoming close with thought leaders in the transplant field, I took a minority investment with my wife, Erika, and two partners to start something that would make a real difference in the lives of transplant patients,” says Carrico. Together, they cofounded BiologicTx, which administers pre- and post-transplant drug infusions, conducts clinical trials, and develops software that helps match donors and transplant recipients domestically and internationally.

The company has opened four offices, ramped up to $88 million in annual revenue as of last year, and helped nearly 150 people receive transplants who wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. BiologicTx’s matching software, which can reasonably facilitate up to nine-way kidney exchanges by pairing incompatible donor-recipients in the same situation, has resulted in more than 350 transplants.

BiologicTx has been so successful, Carrico was able to “retire” (he’s still part owner of the company) last year at 49 to help care for his daughter and to secure financing for and pursue research into polycystic kidney disease, with which his nephew Skyler (EnE’17, CERT M’17) has been diagnosed.

There’s no cure for the inherited disorder, which affects about 600,000 people in the United States. But there is a compound in development, and Carrico is confident it could help eradicate the cysts that enlarge the kidneys and keep them from functioning properly. In addition to working to bring the compound through clinical trials and to market, Carrico is also consulting on a game-changing drug that could halt organ rejection and eliminate the antibodies that prevent someone from being a match with certain donors.

Carrico, who now lives in San Diego, recently flew to Dallas for a Purdue friend’s surprise birthday party. “I reconnected there with another friend from Purdue who I discovered has polycystic kidney disease. His kidney function is 12 percent, so he needs a transplant and may have to go on dialysis,” he says. “It was a wake-up call to get busy helping my nephew and anyone else who could benefit.”