Photo: FNS
Ekaterine Berishvili is a professor in the Department of Surgery and in the Diabetes Centre at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, where she reprograms cells to treat diabetes. Her work has earned her selection as one of the "Faces of Science", a series of portraits presented by the .
Ekaterine Berishvili studied medicine in Tbilisi, Georgia, where she obtained her medical degree in 1999, her PhD in science in 2003, and completed her training in general surgery in 2005. She was appointed Associate Professor at Tbilisi Medical AV短视频 in 2008. Thanks to international collaborations - notably with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York) and the Diabetes Research Institute (Miami) - she set up her own laboratory, specialising in pancreatic bioengineering and cell therapy for type 1 diabetes. She also served as Director of Clinical Research and Head of the Cell Isolation and Transplantation Unit at the Department of Cell Technologies and Therapies in Tbilisi.
In 2014, she joined the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine. Since 2020, she has been head of the Tissue Engineering and Organ Regeneration Laboratory in the Department of Surgery, and since 2023 she has been technical director of the Islet Isolation and Transplantation Laboratory at the HUG - the only facility of its kind in Switzerland. She has been appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery in 2025.
"Our project is simple," she explains. We want to develop a therapy to treat type 1 diabetes, an incurable disease that affects millions of people, particularly children." She is tackling this problem by combining different tissue and cell engineering approaches to replace failing pancreases.