Parijat Bhatnagar

Program Director, Cell-based Medicine; Center for Chemical Biology

Parijat Bhatnagar, Ph.D., is the Program Director for Cell-based Medicine at SRI International. He is a recipient of multiple grant awards including NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and DARPA Young Faculty Award. The focus of his research program is to engineer mammalian cells into platform therapeutics and diagnostics. The engineered cells actively seek disease microenvironments, assess the disease burden, and synthesize proportionate amounts of therapeutic drugs. To accomplish this goal, his team uses synthetic biology and engineering principles to transform cells for responding to different stimuli and bioreactors for clinical-scale manufacturing. With a vision to translate this technology through phased preclinical and clinical trials, he is pursuing his research in the Biosciences Division at SRI International.

Bhatnagar’s multidisciplinary interests derive from his career trajectory that spans across semiconductor manufacturing, industrial engineering, and biotechnology within the context of immune cell engineering, materials design, surface chemistry, and instrumentation.

Bhatnagar has a PhD in biomedical engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY and completed a joint postdoctoral training program in imaging of adoptively transferred cells from at MD Anderson Cancer Center and at Houston Methodist Research Institute.

Join the laboratory for Cell-based Medicine

Positions at all levels (BS/MS/PhD) are generally available. We welcome applications from self-starting enthusiastic candidates who may be interested in exploring the next frontier in T-cell engineering. Interested candidates from immunology and engineering or related backgrounds are encouraged to contact Dr. Bhatnagar at https://www.linkedin.com/in/parijatbhatnagar

Recent publications

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NK-Cell Biofactory as an Off-the-Shelf Cell-based Vector for Targeted In Situ Synthesis of Engineered Proteins (4/1/2021) - NK-cell Biofactory is an off-the-shelf allogeneic platform for cell-based synthesis of desired protein following recognition of a target cell while…

Lentivirus Manufacturing Process for Primary T‐Cell Biofactory Production (5/10/2020) - A process for maximizing the titer of lentivirus particles, deemed to be a necessity for transducing primary cells, is developed.…

Engineered Ovarian Cancer Cell Lines for Validation of CAR T Cell Function (12/20/2019) - A set of genetically engineered isogenic cell lines is developed to express either folate receptor alpha or mesothelin, and a…