Ipsita Banerjee is Professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Her lab engineers human tissue models at the interface of biomaterials, stem cell engineering, and computational biology. The group develops iPSC-derived islet and immune organoids and integrates them into microphysiological systems for metabolic and autoimmune disease modeling. In parallel, her group develops scalable methods to manufacture organoids at translational scale. Complementing this experimental work, the lab builds systems-biology models that track cell-signaling dynamics during differentiation and, more recently, AI models for label-free identification of cell phenotype. Together, these efforts aim to make tissue function a predictable outcome of engineering design.

Building human-relevant models is fundamentally an engineering problem. Our group approaches this through biomaterial integration as a shared foundation, spanning metabolic disease models to immune organoid engineering. In this talk I will share how engineering choices directly influence tissue function and fate.

I will first present the Pancreatic Islet Microphysiological System (PANIS), which maintains functional human islets under perfusion over extended culture through a novel encapsulation strategy. Applying PANIS across glucotoxic and lipotoxic stress revealed that fatty acid stress, rather than glucose alone, most closely recapitulates the molecular signature of clinical type 2 diabetes. Coupling PANIS with a vascularized liver acinus MPS then showed that hepatic dysfunction directly perturbs islet insulin secretion and GLP-1 signaling, resolving inter-organ crosstalk underlying the comorbidity of type 2 diabetes and MASLD. This platform is further compatible with iPSC-derived islets, opening a route to patient-specific and autoimmune-relevant disease modeling.

Turning to immune tissue, I will discuss the development of air-flow-controlled droplet bioprinting to manufacture iPSC-derived thymic organoids at scale. We determined that tuning process parameters not only controls capsule geometry and reproducibility but directly influences organoid fate, producing organoids that generate functional T cells in vivo. Since the thymus directs the T-cell selection that fails in type 1 diabetes and other autoimmunity, this autologous, engineered organoid offers a foundation for restoring immune tolerance.