Leadership Spotlight: Carrie DiMarzio, CEO and Co-Founder

  • January 7th, 2026
  • Company & MilestonesInsights & Perspectives

At BMI OrganBank®, the work begins with Carrie DiMarzio, co-founder and CEO, whose career spans precision engineering, biomedical research, and clinical technology development. A co-inventor and peer-reviewed author, Carrie brings technical rigor and systems-level thinking to one of medicine’s most complex challenges: how donated organs are preserved, assessed, and transported across the transplant system.

Under her leadership, BMI OrganBank is developing organ-preservation and viability-assessment technologies designed to support more informed decision-making throughout the transplant process. Alongside her technical background, Carrie brings an advocacy-informed perspective shaped by years of working closely with patients, families, and clinicians across the transplant community.

While Carrie’s vision sets the direction, she is quick to emphasize that progress at BMI OrganBank is driven by the multidisciplinary team she has assembled around that vision. Her leadership strength lies in bringing together expertise across clinical science, systems development, operations, and advocacy—and fostering an environment where those disciplines operate as an integrated whole.

“Organ scarcity isn’t a donor problem — it’s a time and assessment problem.”
Carrie DiMarzio, CEO, BMI OrganBank

A CEO Shaped by Advocacy

Carrie’s leadership philosophy is rooted in advocacy. Throughout her career, she has repeatedly stepped into roles that required speaking up for individuals during moments when they were unable to advocate for themselves. That lived experience informs how she approaches innovation—ensuring that technology development remains grounded in real human needs.

Rather than pursuing innovation for its own sake, Carrie focuses on solutions that can translate into meaningful clinical and operational progress. Even within highly technical environments, she maintains a clear focus on the people at the center of transplantation: patients waiting for organs, families navigating uncertainty, and clinicians making high-stakes decisions under intense pressure.

Seeing a Need — and Building a Solution

Carrie’s interest in organ preservation began with a moment of clarity.

“I was introduced to a technology that could keep organs alive outside the body, and once I saw its potential, I knew preservation and evaluation could be approached differently.”

She recognized that traditional preservation methods place significant constraints on transplant teams, limiting both the time available for evaluation and the amount of functional information clinicians can access. These constraints, she believed, represented fundamental gaps in transplant medicine—gaps that could be addressed through improved preservation strategies and clearer indicators of organ viability.

That realization sparked a broader line of inquiry: what if preservation systems could provide clinicians with more time and better information, reducing reliance on urgency and incomplete data?

The Triangle of Innovation

Addressing a national challenge, Carrie believed, required a focused and collaborative regional strategy. She adopted a deliberate execution model—building a tightly integrated ecosystem across Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Raleigh by engaging key opinion leaders alongside researchers, engineers, and clinicians.

This “triangle” approach links research, engineering, and clinical validation into a cohesive workflow that supports real-world testing and iterative development. BMI OrganBank collaborates closely with academic and clinical partners, including Advocate Health (Atrium), Duke Medicine and the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, among others.

Together, these collaborations help advance preservation science while ensuring that emerging technologies remain aligned with clinical realities.

Advancing Organ Preservation Technology

Carrie DiMarzio was clear from day one that addressing the limitations of traditional organ preservation would require more than incremental improvements. She founded BMI OrganBank on a simple belief.

“Every viable organ should reach a patient in time.”

Today, thousands of donated organs never make it to surgery — not because of a shortage of donors, but because traditional cold storage holds organs in a non-functioning, hibernated state. Without metabolic activity, transplant teams have limited insight into how an organ is performing during preservation, making viability assessment more uncertain and time-pressured.

BMI OrganBank is developing a new approach. Instead of transporting organs in a passive state, Carrie and her team are designing room-temperature preservation systems intended to maintain physiological activity — allowing organs to receive nutrients, produce urine, and generate measurable indicators of function during preservation. By extending usable preservation time while maintaining organ activity, this approach is designed to reduce urgency in transplant decision-making, support broader geographic matching, and give clinical teams greater flexibility in coordination and scheduling. In doing so, it seeks to create conditions where transplant decisions can be made with greater deliberation, clarity, and confidence.

Leadership Grounded in Science and Execution

Carrie is a co-inventor on multiple patents and a co-author of peer-reviewed research, bringing academic credibility and technical discipline to BMI OrganBank’s development efforts. Her leadership is further informed by her experience as CEO of Industrial Hard Carbon (IHC), a precision engineering company serving biomedical, aerospace, and automotive sectors.

There, she led technical teams, oversaw quality and regulatory systems, and built strategic partnerships—experience that now shapes BMI OrganBank’s approach to developing medical-grade technology with scalability and clinical deployment in mind. That operational foundation also influences how she builds teams: empowering cross-functional collaboration and ensuring complex work progresses efficiently from concept to validation.

What Success Looks Like

Across every stage of BMI’s work — from clinical innovation to logistics to partnerships — Carrie keeps the focus firmly on human outcomes rather than abstract metrics.

At BMI OrganBank, success means:

  • Transplant teams with better information to support confident clinical decisions
  • Patients spending less time waiting for suitable donor organs
  • Reduced logistical pressure on clinicians and support staff
  • A transplant system increasingly guided by data rather than guesswork
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This is where innovation begins to translate into real impact.

Watch the Full Video

Hear Carrie share her perspective on advocacy, innovation, and the future of organ preservation.

Explore More and Connect

Partnerships power our mission. We invite you to engage with BMI OrganBank by reaching out to learn more about our mission or explore partnership opportunities. 

Editor’s Note This profile is part of BMI OrganBank’s Leadership Series, spotlighting the people shaping the future of organ preservation and transplantation.

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Blood-free perfusate

Proprietary acellular perfusate designed to support metabolically active preservation—enabling oxygen delivery, nutrient support, and management of oxidative stress without the need for donor-matched blood.

Real-time visibility across the journey

Tracks organ status and location during preservation and transport, supporting coordination and assessment across teams.

Portable perfusion. Continuous preservation.

Automated, portable device designed to maintain kidneys in a metabolically active state during preservation and transport.
Operates at room temperature without donor-matched blood.