SANGEETA N. BHATIA
John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of
Health Sciences & Technology, Electrical
Engineering & Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical InstituteROBERT E. KLEIN/AP, ©HHMI.Liver cells are very finicky: once removed from the body, they begin to lose function within hours. This has made it difficult for biologists to build an artificial organ for patients whose livers have failed, or even to test new drugs on liver cells. So as a graduate student in Mehmet Toner’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sangeeta Bhatia was given a single task—get liver cells to function outside the body.
To mimic the organization of liver cells in the body—long lines of cells stretched across sandwiched layers of extracellular matrix—in a dish, Bhatia first used chemistry to pattern the surface of glass with hydrophilic and hydrophobic molecules to force rat hepatocytes to line up neatly. Three years later, “it wasn’t really working,” recalls Bhatia.
Her boyfriend and future husband, Jagesh Shah, an MIT electrical-engineering student at the time, mentioned a microfabrication facility on campus that made patterned surfaces for computer chips. “I went over there and convinced them to let me into their facility,” says Bhatia. Using the computer-chip-manufacturing equipment, Bhatia patterned her surfaces with straight collagen lines etched onto glass slides as a physical structure to organize the cells. “That became one of the ...
