Healing Like Nature: Inside Dr. Sumeet Pal Singh’s Regeneration Lab

Editorial / September 02, 2025

From repairing a cut on our finger to regenerating an entire liver, nature has equipped living beings with extraordinary healing powers. Some species, like the tiny zebrafish, take this ability even further, regrowing lost fins, bones, and even insulin-producing cells. For Dr. Sumeet Pal Singh, a developmental and regenerative biologist, these examples of resilience are not curiosities but important clues to how living systems cope with injury and stress.

After completing his education at IIT Kanpur and Duke University, USA, Dr. Singh carried out research in Germany on regeneration across different model organisms, including the zebrafish. His studies have revealed how bone, pancreas, and liver cells can change roles and recover function, insights that hold relevance for conditions such as diabetes and liver injury. He later led a research group at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, before moving to the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (SNIoE), India, as an Associate Professor. His lab continues to use zebrafish to explore regeneration, diabetes recovery, and the body’s response to metabolic stress and liver damage.

“At its core, our lab is motivated by a simple but fundamental question,” Dr. Singh explains. “How do organisms maintain resilience when faced with injury or stress?” The team approaches this question through two interconnected themes: plasticity—the ability of cells to change roles, and adaptation—how biological systems adjust to stress.

To tackle these questions, the lab turns to a powerful experimental model: the zebrafish. With its strong ability to regrow many tissues, including the liver and pancreas, the zebrafish provides unique opportunities to study regeneration. Unlike humans, who have limited capacity to replace certain cell types, zebrafish can recover even after substantial tissue loss. “The zebrafish allows us to observe biology at its most flexible,” Dr. Singh notes. “By watching how they heal, we can begin to uncover principles that might guide new approaches in medicine.”

During his doctoral work, Dr. Singh investigated bone regeneration in zebrafish fins. By selectively removing osteoblasts, the bone-forming cells, he and his colleagues found that regeneration did not stop. Instead, nearby mesenchymal fibroblasts stepped in to rebuild the bone. This unexpected finding demonstrated the redundancy built into biological systems and highlighted cellular plasticity—the ability of one cell type to adopt the role of another.

As a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Singh turned to pancreatic regeneration. In humans, the loss of insulin-producing β-cells leads to diabetes. In zebrafish, however, even complete destruction of these cells does not spell disaster. His team discovered that a subset of pancreatic δ-cells could trans-differentiate into β-cells, effectively acting as a backup source of insulin. “It showed us that cell identities are not always fixed,” he reflects. “Sometimes, cells can surprise us with their flexibility.”

More recently, the Singh Lab has demonstrated similar plasticity in the liver. Using lineage tracing, single-cell transcriptomics, and live imaging, the team revealed that cholangiocytes (cells lining the bile duct) can contribute to hepatocyte regeneration following liver damage. This work highlights how different cell populations coordinate to restore function in one of the body’s most vital organs.

Across bones, pancreas, and liver, the lab’s discoveries point to a unifying principle: biological systems are robust because they are flexible. Cells can shift roles, and organs can adapt, ensuring survival even under extreme conditions.

Looking ahead, the Singh Lab aims to continue decoding these processes in zebrafish to illuminate strategies for human health—whether regenerating insulin-producing cells for diabetes, restoring liver function after damage, or understanding how organisms adapt to starvation and metabolic stress. As Dr. Singh often says, “Nature has already solved many of the problems we struggle with in medicine. Our job is to learn from those solutions and eventually, to translate them for human benefit.”

By Srijita Banerjee