A student who is currently attaining her Ph.D. in chemical engineering, Lisa Volpatti is researching avenues for an automatic, self-administering insulin treatment that individuals with diabetes could take once each day. The insulin would be discharged from an embedded reservoir when a person's blood sugar levels are too high.
Manual insulin administration doesn't usually mimic the capabilities of a healthy pancreas, and it's a burden for patients to administer routine injections on themselves. Volpatti hopes an automatic insulin system may facilitate normal blood sugar levels for extended periods of time.
One in 11 individuals around the world has diabetes, so the potential reach of Volpatti's work is enormous.
"I get really excited about working on something that could potentially help so many people across the globe and give them a higher quality of life," she says. "And it's a really challenging problem, so that's also exciting from a scientific standpoint."
Before attending MIT, Volpatti was a chemical engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh. Towards the end of her senior year, she applied to the graduate program in MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering or ChemE.
Although she didn't get in on her first attempt, that didn't deter her from trying again. After studying abroad and eventually earning her master's degree in chemistry from Cambridge University, Volpatti applied to MIT again and this time, she was accepted.
"I was really embarrassed to share that with people because I felt like I didn't really belong. But now, I think that I've had a lot of success here, and I'm more willing to share that with people who are also struggling with imposter syndrome, or who think that they can't do it, or that if they get a rejection it's the end. It's never the end," Volpatti says.
At Cambridge, her previous research included observing amyloid fibrils, proteins that are normally associated with neurodegenerative disorders, and exploring possible uses for them in biotechnology, particularly in drug delivery.
As a fifth-year student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in the labs of Daniel Anderson and Robert Langer, Volpatti continues to work with drug-delivery applications, only now they are for insulin therapies.
Volpatti and her colleagues have yet to create the perfect self-regulating insulin system, but they have reported good progress. For example, they've made headway in the kinetics of insulin release. In lab tests on rodents, they have reduced the delay in the self-regulating insulin's response to high glucose levels.
She will finish her degree sometime around the end of this year and plans to pursue a postdoc in immunology, specifically in cancer therapy. This will involve similar materials and delivery principles as her current work with insulin, but with an emphasis on the immune system.
