Darshak Bhatt was born on the 2nd of March 1995 in Dholka, India and grew up in Ahmedabad. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Microbiology with distinction from M.G. Science Institute, Gujarat University (2015), where he worked with Prof. Dr. Mrugesh Shukla on fungal biodiversity and cultivation. Motivated to explore advanced genetic engineering beyond India’s limited infrastructure, he joined the International Master’s program in Immunology and Biotherapies at Sorbonne University in Paris (2015–2017). Supported by a French FSDIE mobility scholarship, he conducted his master’s research at the University of São Paulo (USP, Brazil, 2017), under Prof. Maristela Martins de Camargo, investigating the unfolded protein response in B cells of patients with common variable immunodeficiency.
In 2018, he led a student team at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (CRI), Paris, under Dr. Edwin (Jake) Wintermute and Prof. Dr. Ariel Lindner, where they developed star-shaped antimicrobial peptides to combat infections in farm piglets. The project raised over €100k in in-kind support and earned a gold medal at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.
In 2019, he received the ATTP scholarship to pursue a double PhD between the Daemen Lab (UMC Groningen, Netherlands) and the Chammas Lab (USP, Brazil), supervised by Prof. Dr. Toos Daemen and Prof. Dr. Roger Chammas. His research focused on designing safe non-replicating alphaviruses to stimulate immune responses and building high-throughput human-based cancer models. He provided the first evidence that infected tumor cells use extracellular vesicles to alert anticancer immunity. In collaboration with theoretical biologist Prof. Dr. Franjo Weissing, he developed an open-source computational model to simulate virus–cancer–immune dynamics and identify predictors of therapeutic efficacy. This interdisciplinary work earned him dual PhDs, the AIO Prize from the Dutch Tumor Immunology community, and recognition by Brazil’s C2PO cancer consortium.
Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at UMC Groningen (2024–2026), working with Prof. Dr. Debbie van Baarle, a leading expert in immune aging and T-cell immunology. Supported by an NWO-XS grant, he is conducting proof-of-principle studies on cancer virotherapy, exploring how immune histories shape therapeutic outcomes.
Beyond the lab, he co-hosts Bench Talks with SynBioNL, a podcast exploring synthetic biology in the Netherlands. He collaborates internationally with iGEM teams to tackle global challenges like antibiotic resistance and the design of novel biological therapeutics. He also co-founded SynBioNL to foster public dialogue on synthetic biology and represented it in policy discussions at the Rathenau Institute (The Hague) on synthetic cells and society.