Biographical Information

Education

Professional Experience

Honors and Awards

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Research Areas

Dr. Nagrath's research goal is to bring the next generation of engineering tools to patient care, especially in cancer. Her major focus of research is to develop advanced MEMS tools for understanding cell trafficking in cancer through isolation, characterization and study of circulating cell in peripheral blood of cancer patients. Dr. Nagrath’s research on isolating and studying rare cells from cancer patients. She would like to focus her lab’s efforts on designing and developing smart chips using microfluidics and nanotechnology to make impact in medicine and life sciences. Her goal is to create cutting edge engineering solutions for clinical medicine with novel translational biomedical research tools. She strongly believes in building a team where engineers, biologists and clinicians will come together to solve the complex problems with better approaches.

Recent Publications

1. Nagrath S*, Sequist L*, Maheswaran S, Bell DW, Irimia D, Ulkus L, Smith MR, Kwak EL, Digumarthy S, Muzikansky A, Ryan P, Balis UJ, Tompkins RG, Haber DA, Toner M, “Microchip-based Isolation of Rare Circulating Tumor Cells in Cancer Patients”, Nature 450, 1235–1239 (2007).  *Equal contribution. Over 200 Citations (Aug 2010), Most Cited Paper in MEMS in last two years. Featured in Nature News & Views, JAMA, Nature Reviews Cancer, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Nature Top Ten, Nature Clinical Practice Oncology, and Chemical and Engineering News. Cited in Faculty of 1000 Biology and Medicine (Rated as Must Read).
2. Maheswaran S*, Sequist L*, Nagrath S*, Ulkus L, Brannigan B, Collura C, Inserra B, Diederichs S, Iafrate J, Digumarthy S, Muzikansky A, Irimia D, Settleman J, Tompkins R, Lynch T, Toner M, Haber DA, “Detecting Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor gene mutations in circulating tumor cells    from patients with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer”, New England Journal of Medicine 359(4), 366-77 (2008). *Equal contribution. Featured in Nature News & Views, Cited in Faculty of 1000 Biology (Rated as Must Read). 101 Citations (April 2010)
3. Sequist L, Nagrath S, Maheswaran S, Haber DA, Toner M, Lynch TJ “The CTC-chip: An exciting new tool to detect circulating tumor cells in lung cancer patients”, The Journal of Thoracic Oncology 3(4), 281-283 (2009).
4. Stott, S.*, Lee, R*, Nagrath, S.*, Yu, M, Ulkus, L., Inserra, E. J., Ulman, M, Springer, S., Nakamura, Z., Moore, A., L., Tsukrov, D. I., Kempner, M. E., Dahl, D. M., Wu, C., Iafrate, A. J., Smith, M. R., Toner, M., Haber, D. A., Maheswaran, S., “Microfluidic isolation and molecular characterization of circulating tumor cells from patients with localized and metastatic prostate cancer”, Science Translational Medicine, 31 March 2010 Vol 2 Issue 2 . *Equal contribution.
5. Russom A., Gupta A., Nagrath S., DiCarlo D., Edd J, Toner, M., “High throughput microfluidic centrifuge for cell separation” New Journal of Physics 11 (2009) 075025.
6. Nagrath, S., Rosenbach, A. E., Kotz, K., Ting, D., Stott, S., Hsu, C., Sequist, L. V., Maheswaran, S., Haber, D. A., Toner, M., “Negative depletion of leukocytes prior to enrichment of circulating tumor cells from whole blood in microfluidic devices”, (submitted).
7. Nagrath S, K.E. Jansen, R.T. Lahey, I. Akhatov, “Hydrodynamic Simulation of Air Bubble Implosion using a Level Set Approach”, Journal of Computational Physics, Volume 215, Issue 1, 2006, 98-132.
8. Nagrath S, K.E. Jansen and R.T. Lahey, “Computation of incompressible bubble dynamics with a stabilized finite element level set method”, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Volume 194, Issues 42-44, 15 October 2005, Pages 4565-4587.