Professor Milica Radisic (BME, ChemE) has been elected a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS), one of Canada’s three national academies. The CAHS leverages the expertise of Canada’s leading health sciences researchers to evaluate our most urgent and complex health challenges and recommend solutions. To be named a CAHS Fellow is considered one of the highest distinctions for academics in the health sciences in Canada.
Radisic is the Canada Research Chair in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering and a senior scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. She is also director of the NSERC CREATE Training Program in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering & Entrepreneurship and a co-founder of the Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies.
Radisic is internationally recognized for spearheading the field of organ-on-a-chip engineering and pioneering new tissue vascularization approaches. She invented methods to grow and mature contractile heart tissues starting from human stem cells, providing platforms for developing and studying human tissues and organs. This heart-on-a-chip technology is key to enabling a paradigm switch from “one-size fits all” drug discovery and testing in animals, towards precise and tailored discovery and testing in human tissues.
To commercially translate this technology, Radisic co-founded TARA Biosystems with her students. The company grew to more than 20 employees before its acquisition by Valo Health in 2022. At Valo, Radisic’s IP is the engine for AI-powered drug discovery, where AI-designed drugs are tested and validated in human cardiac tissue. A second start-up, Quthero, was formed to commercialize unique regenerative peptide materials developed in her lab.
Already a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Radisic is one of only a handful of scholars to be elected to all three of Canada’s national academies. She is also a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the U.S. National Academy of Inventors.
In 2024, Radisic garnered the NSERC John C. Polanyi Award, for a recent outstanding scientific advance. Earlier this year she received a Governor General’s Innovation Award.
“Milica Radisic’s election to this prestigious institution, which makes her a member of all three of Canada’s national academies, demonstrates the incredible impact of her heart-on-a-chip technology across the fields of medicine and engineering,” says U of T Engineering Dean Christopher Yip.
“On behalf of the faculty, I congratulate her on this well-deserved honour.”
