Dr. Uygun received her BSc and MSc in Chemical engineering from Bogazici University and her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Wayne State University. She joined the institute as a postdoctoral fellow in 2006 and was promoted to Instructor in Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 2011. Her research focuses on the application of engineering tools to help patients suffering from liver disease. She is known for her pioneering work in whole human liver engineering where she uses discarded donor livers to make transplantable liver grafts. For this work, she received the prestigious Pathway to Independence Award from NIH in 2011. She is also the recipient of 2013 MGH Claflin Distinguished Award and the 2014 Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Transplant Surgeons. Her publications appeared in Nature Medicine, PloS One, and Tissue Engineering and have been cited over 600 times.

Representative publications

Berendsen TA, Bruinsma BG, Puts CF, Saeidi N, Usta OB, Uygun BE, et al. Supercooling enables long-term transplantation survival following 4 days of liver preservation. Nat Med. 2014 Jul; 20(7):790-3. PubMed PMID: 24973919; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4141719

Uygun BE, Yarmush ML. Engineered liver for transplantation. Curr Opin Biotechnol. 2013 Oct;24(5):893-9. Review. PubMed PMID: 23791465; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3783566

Usta OB, Kim Y, Ozer S, Bruinsma BG, Lee J, Demir E, et al. Supercooling as a viable non-freezing cell preservation method of rat hepatocytes. PLoS One. 2013; 8(7):e69334. PubMed PMID: 23874947; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3713052

Uygun BE, Yarmush ML, Uygun K. Application of whole-organ tissue engineering in hepatology. Nat Rev Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2012 Dec;9(12):738-44. PubMed PMID: 22890112; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3732057

Uygun BE, Soto-Gutierrez A, Yagi H, Izamis ML, Guzzardi MA, Shulman C, et al. Organ reengineering through development of a transplantable recellularized liver graft using decellularized liver matrix. Nat Med. 2010 Jul;16(7):814-20. PubMed PMID: 20543851; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2930603

Soto-Gutierrez A, Yagi H, Uygun BE, Navarro-Alvarez N, Uygun K, Kobayashi N, et al. Cell delivery: from cell transplantation to organ engineering. Cell Transplant. 2010; 19(6):655-65. PubMed PMID: 20525441; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2957541

Information

Basak Uygun, Ph.D.
Massachusetts General Hospital
Center for Engineering in Medicine – Room 246
51 Blossom St
Boston, MA 02114

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