Micro Liver

Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia: The Indian Origin Scientist Who Developed World’s First Human Micro Liver Won $250,000 Heinz Award 

As a 16-year old Bhatia was taken to the bio-engineering lab at MIT by her father and her encounter with the fascinating scientific experiments stirred her imagination and got her interested in Science. 

Her first intervention happened during her graduation at MIT. Dr. Bhatia was assigned the task of cultivating living liver cells in a petri dish, an endeavor that had been attempted unsuccessfully for many years. After three years of effort, a visit to a microfabrication facility—where students laid circuits out on silicon chips—inspired Dr. Bhatia to experiment with the process to see if it could be used to “print” tiny liver cells on plastic.The result was the first human “micro-liver”, a miniature model organ that makes it possible to test drug reactions efficiently and predictively, and could eventually lead to an artificial human liver.

Micro-livers are now used by dozens of bio-pharmaceutical companies and are being developed as a powerful laboratory tool for testing cures for malaria, specifically the testing of drugs that can eradicate the reservoir of parasites that remain in the liver even after a patient’s symptoms subside.

Owing to this incredible micro-liver discovery, Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia received the Heinz Award in Technology, the Economy and Employment category, for her seminal work in tissue engineering and disease detection, including the cultivation of functional liver cells outside of the human body, and for her passion in promoting the advancement of women in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia is currently Director of LMRT at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

Bhatia has also been recognized as one of the “the nation’s most promising young professors in science and engineering” by the Packard Foundation. Forbes named her one of 18 Indian scientists – across all nations – who are “changing the world” and “one of the 100 most creative people in business” by Fast Company. In 2014, Dr. Bhatia was awarded the $ 500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize.

She and her over 150 trainees have contributed to more than 40 issued or pending patents and launched 10 biotechnology companies with 70+ commercial products at the intersection of medicine and miniaturization.

As a biotech engineer and medical researcher at MIT, Dr. Bhatia also works as an inventor, entrepreneur and is also a classical Indian dancer.

Thus, Indians such as Bhatia bring fame to our country no matter where they are!