Researcher

Sangeeta Bhatia

Profile

Sangeeta Bhatia is an Indian-American biomedical engineer and physician-scientist at MIT and the Broad Institute who is a pioneer in the field of tissue engineering and nanomedicine. Her laboratory engineered microscale human liver tissues (micropatterned co-cultures) that maintain liver-specific functions for weeks in culture—an achievement with profound implications for drug toxicity testing, hepatitis virus studies, and malaria liver-stage research. These liver-on-a-chip systems have been licensed to pharmaceutical companies and have partially replaced animal testing for drug hepatotoxicity screening. Bhatia also developed nanoparticle-based cancer diagnostics that can detect tumors by analyzing urine for synthetic biomarker peptides, enabling non-invasive cancer detection. Her work spans tumor microenvironment engineering, extracellular vesicles as therapeutics carriers, and programmable pro-drugs activated by tumor proteases. Bhatia has co-founded multiple biotech companies and holds over 100 patents. Pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies working on organ-on-chip platforms, nanoparticle drug delivery, and cancer liquid biopsy technologies work extensively with the platforms and principles her laboratory established.

Industry Ties