Published on May 19, 2025
Member Spotlight: Ami Bhatt, MD, PhD
by Ami Bhatt, MD, PhD
This spotlight features Ami Bhatt, MD, PhD, the newly appointed Director of Laboratory Science on the ASTCT Board of Directors. A physician-scientist at Stanford University, Dr. Bhatt’s work bridges translational research and clinical innovation in the field of transplantation and cellular therapy. She shares her goals for her term, insights on emerging developments in lab science and a few personal reflections.
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As ASTCT’s Director of Laboratory Science, what are your key goals or priorities during your term?
My key goal is to enhance participation of basic and translational scientists across ASTCT’s programs and initiatives. Our society is filled with some of the most talented and bright clinicians, clinical trialists, epidemiologists and allied health professionals in all of medicine. I hope to strengthen collaborations and connections between the basic science, translational science and clinical leaders and trainees within our community to advance transplantation and cellular therapy.
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What do you see as the most exciting developments in lab science within the transplant and cellular therapy field right now?
Over the past few years, we’ve seen exciting advances in clinical care that have been driven by basic science insights pioneered by members of our community. For example, post-transplant cyclophosphamide has emerged as a new standard of care in GVHD prophylaxis, and preclinical research has demonstrated promising progress in the generation of allogeneic CAR-T and even in vivo CAR-T products.
I am hopeful that continued advances in these areas will help us improve immune reconstitution, limit GVHD and non-relapse related mortality and lower relapse rates in HCT patients. Furthermore, I am excited about opportunities to overcome some of the manufacturing challenges in CAR-T therapy that might help broaden access to these lifesaving therapies.
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What originally drew you to this field, and what continues to inspire your work today?
Like many members of our community, I was drawn to this field for three reasons:
1. There was a clear clinical opportunity to help provide lifesaving and curative therapies to individuals with serious diseases. Watching transplantation in action as a trainee —when it worked well and without complications — was inspiring. I wanted to ensure that we could extend these therapies to everyone who needed them and hoped that we could mitigate a lot of the risk associated with these therapies.
2. I think this is a field where basic science findings are most directly connected to clinical care and vice versa. We have an unparalleled opportunity to move learnings from the bench to the bedside and back, both for the benefit of our patients and to advance our fundamental knowledge of biology.
3. I have had wonderful and generous mentors from institutions near and far. Starting with Rob Soiffer and Joe Antin to Mary Horowitz, Miguel Perales and Leslie Kean, members of our community have proven to be brilliant, inspiring, welcoming and supportive — to me and to the newer generations of scientists and clinicians in our field.
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What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to early-career scientists or physician-researchers entering this space?
This is a wonderful and highly interactive field. I advise investing your time and energy in becoming an expert in your research domain while also taking advantage of the opportunity to speak with and learn from others in the field. One of the things that our lab did early on, which I think helped us a ton, was talk about our unpublished results early and often. This helped us build bridges between research groups, accelerate our science and benefit from the amazing research community that exists at ASTCT!
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