Professor Milica Radisic (BME, ChemE) is one of six recipients nationwide of a 2025 Governor General’s Innovation Award. These national awards celebrate exceptional Canadians for their excellence in innovation, and their contributions in helping to shape the future and positively impact quality of life. Radisic is being honoured for her development of heart-on-a-chip technology for drug discovery and disease modelling.
Radisic is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering and a senior scientist at the Toronto General Research Institute. She is a co-founder of the Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies and a member of the Scientific Leadership team of the Acceleration Consortium. She has served on boards of directors for the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers and the Canadian Biomaterials Society, and she is a scientific officer on the Biomedical Engineering Panel for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Radisic has co-founded two companies: TARA Biosystems — acquired by Valo Health — which uses the heart-on-a-chip platform for drug development and safety testing, and Quthero, which advances regenerative peptide materials.
Radisic’s research focuses on organ-on-a-chip engineering and the development of new biomaterials that promote healing. Most notably, she developed the Biowire heart-on-a-chip platform, which enables the formation of mature human heart tissue for toxicity testing, drug development and modelling of human genetic disease. Traditional drug testing relies on animal models, which do not capture human genetic diversity and sex specificity. Using electrical stimulation and microfabrication of elastomeric polymers, Radisic developed methods, such as the Biowire platform, to grow and mature contractile heart tissues from human stem cells. This has enabled more efficient drug discovery and testing. Radisic also used the platform to model heart disease in patients treated in several Canadian hospitals, uncovering the underlying genetic mechanisms leading to this condition.
Radisic is a fellow of eight prestigious scholarly academies, including the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Inventors and the Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine International Society. She has received around 50 national and international awards, including the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, YWCA Woman of Distinction Award, Killam Fellowship, Steacie Prize, Humboldt Research Award and the NSERC John C. Polanyi Award.
“Milica Radisic’s heart-on-a-chip technology has been a game-changer in the field of tissue engineering, enabling major advances in the development and testing of pharmaceuticals, and creating new ways to model conditions such as heart disease,” says U of T Engineering Dean Christopher Yip.
“On behalf of the Faculty, I congratulate her on this prestigious and well-deserved honour.”
