SELF EXAM:

Occupation: Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery (Bioengineering), Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

Alternative career choice: I always wanted to be a surgeon but ultimately decided to go to an engineering school. After a rather tortuous path, I ended up becoming a Professor of Surgery at Harvard as a bioengineer.

What do rock stars and scienctists have in common: We are all communicators-- some better than others! They use songs to communicate their feelings and we use scientific mechanisms to disseminate our ideas. To be successful in both, one needs to have both creativity and skills. So I think there is more in common between rock stars and scientists than meets the eye!

I tend to approach life: When I was younger I used to approach life very seriously, now not so much. I try to enjoy what I do, I carefully select people with whom I work, and try to, usually unsuccessfully, balance personal life, professional life, and family life.

Biggest misconceptions about me or my work: Most people think professors sit at a desk and then lecture. Although I do some of that, most of my time is spent motivating a team of young scientists, establishing collaborations, creating an environment conducive for uninhibited creativity, and raising funds to get the work done.

Worst part-time job ever: I am blessed with positivity and I do not recall any worst part-time job. I learned early in my life from my parents that I need to do my best whatever the job is and enjoy the journey. I think I have practiced that quite well!

Longest med school study session: I took almost half of the medical courses including significant clinical training as part of my multi-disciplinary doctorate education in biomedical engineering. Anatomy class was an eye opener for an engineer like me. I loved it but I felt the course was never going to come to an end. We must have spent 30+ hours a week dissecting cadavers and trying to find every single structure in human body.

Best moment in medicine/research: The dogma in the cancer field was that circulating tumor cells are not in numbers to be clinically useful in the peripheral blood. We challenged the dogma because my feeling was that the technologies used in the field in the past were not developed specifically for isolating extremely rare cells and thus were not sensitive enough for the task of isolating rare cells. We went to blackboard and designed and developed a microfluidic chip for this purpose. When we started getting cells at numbers that could potentially change the way we diagnose, manage, and treat cancer patients, I was thrilled!

ABOUT MY RESEARCH:

Disease Area: Given my multidisciplinary interests, I cut across several disease areas in my research including cancer, global health, burns and trauma, and regenerative medicine.

Research Area: My research area is in biomedical engineering, more specifically in the applications of micro- and nano-technology in clinical medicine.

Science Impact/Accomplishments or Goal: My interest in nanotechnology has led to groundbreaking work in the isolation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the peripheral blood of cancer patients. Although the existence of CTCs has been known for 140 years, they have eluded researchers because they are so rare—as few as 1 CTC in one billion of blood cells. I developed a highly sensitive microfluidic chip technology called "CTC-chip." The CTC-chip interrogates 2 million cells per second enabling processing of large volumes of blood to find extremely rare CTCs. The potential of the CTC-chip is tremendous as it can allow physicians to detect cancers early, follow how well cancers are responding to treatments in 'real time' and develop drugs that are aimed at suppressing these metastasizing cells.

Research Description: I am motivated by multi-disciplinary problems at the interface of engineering and life sciences that are of clinical importance, and deploy engineering tools to understand complex biomedical problems. I have had the good fortune to work on a number of exciting fields including cryobiology for long-term storage of biological materials to make them readily available for therapeutic applications in regenerative medicine, stem cells, cell therapy, and reproductive medicine; tissue engineering to grow tissues and organs as replacement parts for injured or diseased organs especially interested in bioartificial liver and skin; and micro/nanotechnology as an enabling approach to probe into basic biological mechanisms and to tackle complex clinical problems.

Videos courtesy of Stand Up To Cancer.