Mar. 19, 2026
Chandan Sen Is Unlocking Healing Through Regenerative Medicine
Chandan Sen, a world-renowned regenerative medicine expert and pioneer of novel wound care technologies, has pioneered novel solutions for tissue injury and diabetic wound repair and propelled commercialization of a wide variety of therapeutics, preventives and related products.
“How do you have certain parts of your body regain functionality through a process of regeneration,” asks Chandan K. Sen, director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh—considered the oldest regenerative medicine institute in the country, founded in 2001.
Most people’s bodies can heal themselves from injuries like cuts and broken bones but not from diseases like diabetes or certain kinds of traumatic injuries. Regenerative medicine develops ways to jump-start and enable the healing process in tissues and organs.
Sen, a world-renowned regenerative medicine expert and pioneer of novel wound care technologies, joined Pitt in 2023 as associate vice chancellor for life sciences innovation and commercialization, health sciences, also holds the inaugural Bartley P. Griffith Chair in Regenerative Medicine. He was inducted as a lifetime member of the National Academy of Inventors in 2022.
In these leadership roles, he is responsible for accelerating momentum in research areas that are key to the future of the Pittsburgh region and for driving collaboration with local and national academic and industry partners to speed scientific discoveries to patients and the marketplace. Sen is also professor of surgery and of plastic surgery, School of Medicine, and is chief scientific officer of UPMC Wound Care Services.
“The fact that the body has capabilities to regenerate was not something that was known many decades ago, and this type of outcome is exactly what McGowan is here for.”
“The key goal of McGowan is to be able to innovate in ways that bring transformative solutions to the market,” he said.
In a recent video, Sen spoke about a case involving Ronald Strang, whose leg was severely damaged by a roadside bomb when he was a young Marine sergeant on patrol in Afghanistan in 2010. He regained the use of his leg thanks to participation in a McGowan Institute clinical trial with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense.
“The standard of care at the time failed to address his requirements,” Sen said, “at which time Dr. [Stephen] Badylak of McGowan stepped in and came up with this idea that we could actually build on the body's own regenerative responses and enhance them to achieve amazing outcomes that otherwise would not be achieved.”
He continued, “This is not just success for the patient, it is very inspiring for the scientists.” The fact that the musculoskeletal system “has capabilities to regenerate was not something that was known many decades ago, and this type of outcome is exactly what McGowan is here for.”
Sen’s research lab is known for pioneering novel solutions for tissue reprogramming and diabetic wound repair and has propelled commercialization of a wide variety of therapeutics, preventives and related products in the field. His scientific breakthroughs in tissue nanotransfection, electroceutical biofilm infection management, nanomedicine and bioinformatics apply to a wide range of diseases and conditions. Sen is currently the national vice chair and chair-elect of the NIH-sponsored multi-institutional Diabetic Foot Consortium.
Among many awards and honors, Sen’s team won the 2016 Frost & Sullivan award for codevelopment of electroceutical dressing technology. They also won the 2018 Edison Award for Innovation for the development of a nanochip device that uses tissue nanotransfection (TNT) and nanoporation to noninvasively reprogram one type of tissue into another functionality. These TNT-based technologies could potentially enable skin and other tissue to be converted to tissue types necessary for supplying blood to ischemic tissues, reducing diabetic complications and regrowing damaged and diseased tissue.
Sen earned his Master of Science in human physiology from the University of Calcutta, his PhD in physiology from the University of Eastern Finland, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Pitt, he served at Indiana University (IU) as the J. Stanley Battersby Professor of Surgery, a distinguished university professor, executive director of the IU Health Wound Care Center and director of the Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering (ICRME), among other leadership roles. Sen has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers (H-index 121) and a dozen books, which have been cited more than 57,000 times.