Microtechnology, Medicine and Mentoring: One Inventor’s Formula for Success
Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia is a leader in advancing human health care — and a role model for other women interested in STEM.
Born near Boston, Massachusetts, to parents who immigrated to the United States from India, Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia is an MIT professor, a physician, a bioengineer, an entrepreneur and a patent-holding inventor. She is also a mother of two teenage girls.
Each of these roles informs Dr. Bhatia’s work, which centers on leveraging existing microtechnology to improve human health. Her lab at MIT focuses specifically on building synthetic biological sensors that are bioengineered to help in the detection and treatment of cancer and liver disease.
Learn more about the social and economic impact of invention through the RAND report “Measuring the Value of Invention,” documenting twenty-five years of the Lemelson-MIT (LMIT) Prize.
The winner of the 2014 Lemelson-MIT Prize and a passionate mentor, Dr. Bhatia uses her sizeable platform to motivate young people, especially women, to follow their interests in STEM. “I hope to inspire young girls who are considering being inventors or engineers or technologists or doctors to see that this is an exciting profession,” she says. Dr. Bhatia carries her enthusiasm to her lab, where she encourages her students to tinker and have fun with their experiments — and to recognize that the invention process involves a lot of missteps: “Science is probably 90 percent failure,” she says. “The ‘Aha’ moments don’t happen that often — but when they come, they’re well worth it.”
In the United States, women comprise just 12 percent of all patent-holding inventors and own fewer than 10 percent of technology startups backed by venture capital, and women founders receive a meager 2.7 percent of all venture capital. Dr. Bhatia has transcended these often gendered contours, cofounding five startups and serving as a founding adviser for a number of companies launched by her students. In 2020, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, becoming one of only 25 people who have ever been elected to all three national academies (Science, Engineering and Medicine). We spoke with her about the impact she hopes to make on the future of medicine — and on the future of young women in science.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about the focus of your research.
My lab is really interested in leveraging engineering tools that came out of what we call the tiny technologies — micro and nano technology — in medical applications. The lab is split between two big medical diseases. The first category is liver disease and the second category is cancer.
What are the medical applications for micro and nano technology?
We invented a nanosensor, which we envision as a shot that you would get and that then could be converted into a urine test for different diseases. In particular, we’re interested in cancer monitoring — early cancer detection for patients that might have lung cancer or liver cancer. And what we’re hoping is that you could do this test in a point-of-care way on what we call a paper diagnostic, which would be similar to a pregnancy test. So you would get a shot and have a urine test, and this would be a way to monitor cancer or detect it early without the need for expensive screening infrastructure like we have now for mammography and for colonoscopy.
What does impact invention mean to you?
For me invention, is actually kind of a process. So what tends to happen is we start out in a particular direction and we find something surprising and we may often reposition it and evolve it to have the most impact as we go. The cancer detection project actually started as a project where we were trying to make MRI contrast agents using a shot. And what the students noticed was that the urine was lighting up with the sensing molecule. So once we had that kind of serendipitous discovery we started realizing that we didn’t need an MRI machine at all.
In the coming years 70 percent of cancer will be in the developing world. So we changed our invention to have the most impact. We have this iterative cycle of invention and impact to try and find our way to the most near-term, high-impact application of the finding.
You mentioned the developing world. How much does that factor into the work you do?
Because I trained as a doctor, I think I’m really kind of acutely aware of the global health landscape. I’m of Indian descent and I grew up every other summer in India in Bombay surrounded by communities that don’t have a significant health infrastructure. I went to the clinic with an aunt of mine who was a physician, so I’m always kind of thinking about not just medicine as it is here in the U.S., but how it is worldwide. So I think having that kind of medical training really helps you reposition your technical inventions to think about how they could have the most impact clinically.
How important is it for inventors to have support throughout the entire invention pathway, from inspiration to incubation?
One thing I think that’s really notable about this moment in time is that we live in an instant gratification culture. And actually, technology invention is something that requires a lot of hard work and persistence and resilience. And because of that, you need support at every level, from training to idea inception to idea development, and all the way to incubation.
You’ve said STEM education is very important for girls. How do you help foster that from elementary school on, and make sure that there’s a pipeline of women inventors?
We know in engineering in particular that young girls start to drop out of the discipline as early as age 11. We call that the leaky pipeline, and it continues through college. More girls will declare engineering as freshmen than the ones who will see that through graduate school, professorship, entrepreneurship and all the way to the boardroom. So one thing that we’ve learned is that having accessible role models — women further along in the pipeline who managed to make it work and seem to be enjoying it — can really make a difference. I’m hopeful that I can be one of those people.
I have projects pointed at every leak in the pipeline for women in engineering. We have an outreach program called Keys to Empowering Youth, which is focused on middle school-aged girls who come to MIT for the day and participate in interactive workshops. Over the course of the day, they also meet a whole bunch of college-age women engineers who are much closer to their age and really accessible, so they’re getting role models and inspiration and hands-on activities over the course of the day.
And I’m the advisor to the Society of Women Engineers here at MIT, so that gives me an opportunity to talk to young girls who are thinking about engineering as a major about what a great profession it is and why they should stay in it. And then I have graduate students and postdocs in my lab who I try and cultivate who have become professors themselves or entrepreneurs.
Are you seeing a greater number of young people and women making it through that pipeline? What do you hope to see in a perfect world to support invention, to support women in the field?
One thing that’s notable about this moment in time for medical invention is that in some ways we’re competing with other kinds of inventors. So many of our students here can see the success of something like Instagram — that seems very appealing in some ways and they know that medical inventions take 10 or 20 years from inception to patient impact. So I think everything that we can do to cultivate excitement and inspiration and talent in this field is really important and the best way to do that, I think, is to highlight success stories, to have people showing how they had that ‘Aha’ moment and how impactful their invention became.
What kind of support systems do you think need to exist for invention to allow for serendipitous discovery as well as failure and retooling?
The biggest support system that I think is needed to make impactful inventions is having enough prepared minds around the table to sort of connect the dots. Here at MIT, what we try to do is have people from all different backgrounds constantly colliding with each other. Because when the doctor comes together with the chemist comes together with the engineer comes together with the biologist, that’s when somebody can actually make that connection and prevent a potentially impactful invention from being left on the table.
