A medical researcher has won the $500,000 Lemelson-Massachusetts Institute of Technology prize for work that included developing a model liver to use in studying disease.
Sangeeta Bhatia, an engineer and researcher at MIT, worked with a team of colleagues to create a "microliver" that functions like a real human liver and furthers research into liver disease and cancer, NBC News reported.
"We try to be really nimble," Bhatia, 46, told NBC News before the prize was announced on Tuesday. "As innovations emerge, we're constantly asking whether they can be repurposed for one of the two diseases we concentrate on: liver disease and cancer."
Because liver cells rapidly start to lose function after being removed from the human body, it was difficult for researchers to grow a liver in the lab that mimicked a normal liver. The MIT team has developed microlivers that "model human drug metabolism, predict drug toxicity and interact with human pathogens," according to a press release.
"We use that exact same process, but what we do is pattern our petri dishes with molecules that living cells attach to," Bhati told NBC News.
She and her colleagues used computer chip technologies to develop the microlivers and other biomedical tools, implementing the photolithography techniques used to make integrated circuits.
Bhati has also developed "synthetic biomarkers" to help detect diseases such as cancer. In the simple process, nanoparticles can be injected into a patient, where they will interact with diseased tissue to make biomarkers that show up in urine samples. The disease-screening system, which is purportedly as straightforward as a pregnancy test, is in the works for commercialization.
The next step for Bhati is to see if harmless bacteria can be used to combat cancer by diagnosing the disease or even fighting it.
"We've been looking at engineering probiotics so they can enter the body and be cancer-diagnostic or cancer-therapeutic," she told NBC News. "The interesting thing about probiotics is that they are already in people, so it's not too unrealistic to imagine that one could one day manipulate the microbiome in cancer patients."
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