Healing through Innovation: Doctors Embracing their Inner Engineer

"As an engineer, I'm inspired by this miniaturisation revolution in computers. As a physician, I wonder whether we could use it to reduce the number of lives lost due to one of the fastest-growing diseases on Earth: cancer", says Dr Sangeeta Bhatia in her TED talk. In this modern world, scientists and doctors are trying to understand how to diagnose and treat diseases. With advancements in health technology, millions of lives can be saved by detecting and diagnosing deadly diseases like cancer and malaria. A quick and early diagnosis makes all the difference in saving a life. This makes advancements in health technologies to detect and cure diseases one of the greatest engineering achievements of the twentieth century.

Bhatia is a bioengineer and physician working on new health technologies. She studied bioengineering at Brown University, where she focused on artificial organs. Using knowledge and ideas from engineering, Bhatia developed a method of growing functioning liver cells outside the human body as part of her doctoral work. She could adapt ideas from semiconductor fabrication to the microfabrication of a substrate for liver cells. She used photolithography to create this substrate to grow a functioning micro liver in a petri dish. Her team also used techniques from 3D printing to create a lattice of sugar as a framework for a synthetic vascular system which paves the way for growing a fully functioning liver in the lab.

While Bhatia's work is looking to find a cure for cancer, it also helps save countless lives through early cancer detection. Her team is looking at detecting tumours sooner using micro and nano technologies. Today, some tumours can be detected only after ten years old. A nano-detector could travel through our bloodstream and look for tumours. It does this by getting activated in the presence of enzymes produced by tumour cells. These activated particles travel through the kidneys and get excreted through the urine. These particles can be trapped on a paper strip, potentially making cancer detection accurate, fast and ultra-cheap. This approach can be extended to diseases other than cancer, which are hard to detect without sophisticated lab equipment. Imagine the number of lives saved if we could buy a cheap paper test from a pharmacy and get tested for cancer at home. This solution overcomes one of the significant constraints in modern medicine, the ability to be administered by people with no formal training in places with no hospital facilities.

As innovations continue to emerge in the medical field, countless lives can be saved with the diversity of bioengineers, each with different cultural backgrounds and perspectives that can benefit this field. An article by Richard B. Freeman and Wei Huang in 'Nature' magazine shows that research teams with greater diversity created better research papers that are valuable to the scientific community. It shows how various people, white, non-white, men, women, minorities and more, can lead to effective and efficient solutions and bring varied experiences and viewpoints that otherwise would be lost.

I learned how diverse perspectives help generate better solutions through my biology class project to build the model of an animal cell. The girls in my group came up with the novel idea of baking a cake and decorating it with candy and chocolate organelles to build the model. It was a great idea; we had the sweetest cell model! We literally had the cake and ate it too. We gained a better understanding of the functions of the cell and its organelles, and we also had fun sharing it with the class. Nothing encourages learning like fun. Our creative cell model helped explain the cell model to many students who were not keen on biology. If ours was not a diverse team, we might have completed the project just like everyone else - on paper or using modelling clay. This experience taught me the value of diversity.

Malcolm Forbes said that diversity is the "art of thinking independently together." Bhatia's team showed that a diverse group of men and women, engineers and physicians, will not only celebrate diversity but also create solutions for a safer and healthier planet for everyone!

References

Bhatia, S. (n.d.). This tiny particle could roam your body to find tumors. Sangeeta Bhatia: This tiny particle could roam your body to find tumors | TED Talk. Retrieved February 1, 2023, from https://www.ted.com/talks/sangeeta_bhatia_this_tiny_particle_could_roam_your_body_to_find_tumors.

2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (n.d.). Sangeeta N. Bhatia, MD, Phd. Sangeeta Bhatia | Koch Institute. Retrieved February 1, 2023, from https://ki.mit.edu/people/faculty/sangeeta-bhatia.

Kent Scientific Corporation. The Importance of Diversity in Biomedical Research. (n.d.). Retrieved February 1, 2023, from https://www.kentscientific.com/blog/the-importance-of-diversity-in-biomedical-research/.