NIH Demystifying Medicine: Tiny Technologies and Medicine From Hepatic Tissue Engineering to Cancer Nanotechnology

Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia is director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at the Koch Institute and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She also is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Science.

The Bhatia Laboratory studies how micro- and nanoscale systems can be deployed to understand, diagnose, and treat human disease.

Dr. Bhatia will describe her progress in two application areas: liver disease and cancer. In the area of the liver, her lab is developing microtechnology tools to understand how ensembles of cells coordinate to produce tissues with emergent properties in the body. They have used this understanding to fabricate human micro-liver tissues in both ‘2D’ and ‘3D’ formats that enable us to study the pathogenesis of relapsing malaria and liver regeneration.

In the area of cancer, the lab is developing nanotechnology tools to meet the challenge of delivering cargo into the tumor microenvironment where transport is dominated by diffusion. Their strategy is to design nanotechnologies that emulate nature’s mechanisms of homing, activation, and amplification to deliver cytotoxic drugs, diagnostic tools, imaging agents, and nucleic acids to tumors.

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