Biohub, a technology based medical research organization, has a goal as simple as it is audacious: to cure—or prevent—all disease. To pursue this goal, Biohub (formerly CZ Biohub) in Chicago has brought together experts from leading universities in the region, including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University. As a marker of the department’s influence, 10 of the 48 members of the inaugural cohort came from the Department of Bioengineering.
But faculty are not the only ones making an impact in this critical organization. Biohub also receives many important contributions from graduate students. Two of these students, Dhanush Gandavadi and Revathi Manoharaan from the University of Illinois, working in the labs of Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) member Xing Wang and CCIL Director Rohit Bhargava, recently had their work recognized with the Spark Award. The Spark Award highlights projects that showcase the power of cross-disciplinary thinking and the creativity of emerging scientists across our partner institutions.
“Receiving this award is incredibly meaningful to us,” said Manoharaan. “It represents validation of a bold, early-stage idea that emerged from open-ended brainstorming and curiosity.” Gandavadi appreciated that the Spark Award represented more than funding, saying it “was a vote of confidence in trainee-led, high-risk, high-reward science. We are deeply grateful for a system that encourages ambitious thinking and provides the space to explore ideas that could reshape how we study inflammation.”
Dhanush Gandavadi
The project at its core examines the relationship between cancer and inflammation. The goal is to better understand how inflammation develops, changes and affects disease by observing immune responses in real time. To accomplish this, the team is building an “inflammatory atlas,” which they describe as “a framework to map tumor–immune dynamics in space and time with high resolution.”
Revathi Manoharaan
Their idea came from another Biohub initiative, a brainstorming project focused on identifying inflammation’s most pressing challenges. “Through discussions with our mentors, we recognized a unique opportunity to combine engineering, immunology and advanced measurement tools to visualize immune behavior in an entirely new way,” said Manoharaan. “This is when the idea of building an experimental inflammatory atlas using platforms began to take shape.”
Support from the Spark Award will help the team continue this project. “Our next steps involve developing the specific components needed to study defined immune cell and tumor interactions of interest,” said Gandavadi. “We plan to begin with a simplified platform and progressively increase complexity to understand how the system evolves.”
The potential for this project goes beyond understanding inflammation around cancer. Once completed, this method could serve as a platform for understanding inflammation around a far broader range of diseases, as Manoharaan explains: “Once established, this atlas could serve as a foundational resource for studying diverse inflammatory contexts and enable systematic comparisons across conditions, tissues and perturbations.”
The Department of Bioengineering is proud to support projects with real-world implications like this. “The department’s emphasis on quantitative thinking, rigorous experimental design and collaboration was essential in developing a proposal that bridges engineering, immunology and high-resolution measurement,” said Gandavadi. “This environment empowers trainees to lead bold, integrative research efforts.”
Both researchers wanted to thank their mentors and the program that made this possible, saying in a joint statement, “We are especially thankful to the Biohub for creating such a thoughtful program for identifying big ideas and fostering trainee-led innovation. We are also deeply grateful to our collaborators and mentors, professors Xing Wang and Rohit Bhargava, the Biohub grants team, and Dr. Basia Galinski for her tremendous behind-the-scenes support in making this entire process seamless. This project is very much a collective effort, and we are excited for what lies ahead.”
Editor’s notes:
Dhanush Gandavadi (dhanush3@illinois.edu) from CCIL Member Xing Wang’s lab: https://sites.google.com/site/xingwangslab/
Revathi Manoharaan (revathi4@illinois.edu) from CCIL Director Rohit Bhargava’s lab: https://chemimage.illinois.edu/
This story was first published by the Department of Bioengineering on January 30, 2026 and is available here.