Featured content
2026 Oration
Building Human Tissues on Chips: Toward a Future Beyond Animal Testing
Date: Wednesday, 5th August
Time: 6:00pm - 7:15pm (AEST)
Location: The Forum, Melbourne Connect
Professor Milica Radisic
Milica Radisic is a Professor at the University of Toronto, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering, and Senior Scientist at the Toronto General Research Institute. She is the co-founder of the Center for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies (CRAFT) and scientific co-lead of the Human Organ Emulation Self-Driving Laboratory within the Acceleration Consortium.
A Fellow of ten prestigious academies and professional societies, including the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Dr. Radisic has received numerous distinctions such as the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Under 35, the Killam Fellowship, and the Humboldt Research Award.
Internationally recognized for pioneering organ-on-a-chip (OoC) engineering, her research focuses on developing biomaterials and microphysiological systems to model human organs and diseases. Her lab leverages induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to create functional human heart tissues and novel vascularization methods, advancing disease modeling and regenerative medicine.
Dr. Radisic serves as Executive Editor for ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering and holds editorial positions with multiple leading journals. She is also the cofounder of two biotechnology companies: TARA Biosystems, acquired by Valo Health, and Quthero, which develops regenerative peptide-based materials. With over 260 publications, 26,000 citations, and an h-index of 81, her work appears in top journals including Cell, Nature Materials, and PNAS.
Abstract
How can we study human disease, test new medicines, and predict treatment safety without relying on animal models that often fail to reflect human biology? In this talk, Professor Milica Radisic will present how her team is engineering human tissues on chips - miniature, living models of organs such as the heart, blood vessels and kidney. By combining human cells with advanced biomaterials and microengineering, these systems recreate key aspects of human physiology and provide powerful new tools for understanding disease and improving drug development.
The lecture will highlight recent advances, including heart tissues that beat and respond to medicines, and engineered blood vessels that can be perfused and remodelled like those in the body. A particular focus will be the emerging role of immune cells as key organisers of tissue function, revealing how interactions between different cell types are essential to building more realistic and predictive models.
In this presentation, Dr. Radisic will describe her work developing engineered human heart tissues, which led to the spinout company TARA Biosystems. TARA tested molecules for major pharma companies before it was acquired by an AI-drug discovery company Valo Health. This acquisition helped enable a major cardiovascular drug discovery partnership ($4.6B) with Novo Nordisk.
Dr. Radisic will further highlight her research on personalized heart-tissue models for patients treated at Toronto General Hospital and the SickKids, and organ-on-a-chip platforms for studying inflammation and biomarkers for COVID-induced heart failure.
Looking ahead, Professor Radisic will explore the future of biomedical research through AI-powered, self-driving laboratories, where robotics and machine learning can design, build and test thousands of experiments. These technologies have the potential to accelerate discovery, improve reproducibility, and enable more scalable, human-relevant research, while also raising important ethical considerations.