Last week Professor Sangeeta Bhatia was featured in a fantastic profile on NOVA’s scienceNOW. Bhatia is recognized as a pioneer in bioMEMS and directs the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies at MIT. Although Bhatia’s work explores a wide range of topics, she is most well-known for her development of micro-livers-on-a-chip. Primary liver cells are notoriously difficult to maintain in culture, and Bhatia found that cultured liver cells lived longer when spatially arranged into patterns. To arrange the cells, she took the innovative leap of adapting micropatterning technology from computer chip manufacturing.
Lately the Bhatia lab has also been in the news for their work on using nanotechnology to battle cancer. One of the biggest problems with current cancer therapies is their harsh side effects; the drugs are non-specific and kill healthy cells along with the cancer cells they are designed to target. Student Geoffrey von Maltzahn and Bhatia worked to develop nanoparticles that could be delivered specifically to the tumor site to kill cells via local application of heat or chemotherapeutics. Based on this work, von Maltzahn recently won the Lemelson-MIT prize for innovation and has founded two companies, Nanopartz, Inc and Resonance Therapeutics.
Related posts:
- 12/9: Sangeeta Bhatia talks at MIT on cooperative nanosystems for cancer diagnosis and therapy
- MIT’s Micro-nanotechnology seminar series Fall 2010 schedule is up!
- Why the boom in cancer nanotechnology?
- Micro/Nano-technology Seminar Series @MIT
- Micro/Nanotech Seminar Series @MIT kicks off Spring 2010
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[...] spun out of Sangeeta Bhatia’s lab at MIT, has developed microliver platforms to enable better prediction of how drugs may affect the [...]