Speaker Spotlight
Professor Havovi Chichger
Havovi Chichger is a Professor of Biomedical Science at Anglia Ruskin University.. Her work focuses on understanding how cells function in health and disease, particularly in relation to vascular and epithelial biology. She leads the Biomedical Research Group and is actively involved in research, teaching, and supervising PhD students. Her research interests include taste receptor signalling, diabetes, lung disease, vascular health, and the role of the gut microbiome in barrier function.
Professor Chichger will delve into the weird and wonderful locations in the body that can taste, and also consider how and why these tissues and organs, including the brain and heart, sense taste and what this means in relation to our diet and health in Bitter truths and sweet discoveries: Understanding how taste receptors affect our health taking place on Saturday 21 March at 2pm at Anglia Ruskin University.
"I think the really cool part of this science is the idea that we can sense taste throughout our body, not just on our tongue."
Most of us think of taste as something that only happens on the tongue — when did scientists realise that other parts of the body can “taste” too?
For most of the 20th century, scientists thought taste was exclusively on the tongue but then in the late 1990’s, researchers in Germany identified key taste sensing proteins in the stomach and intestine of rats. This was our first indication that other parts of the body could ‘taste’. Since then, these same proteins were found in a range of different tissues around the body, and there are new locations continuing to be discovered – for example, in 2025, researchers found sweet taste receptors in heart muscle cells.
What are some of the strangest or most unexpected places in the body where taste receptors have been found?
Beyond the tongue, taste receptors have been found in the pancreas, brain, bladder, and bone. We even found these taste sensing molecules in blood vessels in the eye and lungs but probably the most unexpected discovery was to find sweet taste receptors in sperm, where they have been shown to impact swimming direction.
Why would organs like the heart, lungs, or brain need to sense taste at all?
This is the question that we continue to puzzle over. It seems that every organ has a different use for these taste sensors. In the mouth, taste receptors are all about flavour perception. However elsewhere in the body, they seem to be acting as an internal quality control sensor. For example, in the airways of our lungs, bitter taste receptors can sense bitter proteins on the surface of bacteria and trigger a cough or immune defence to protect us against infection. Whereas in the blood vessels surrounding the lungs, sweet taste receptors protect against lung infection by helping the vessels to form a tight barrier.
In the heart, sweet taste receptors seem to influence heart beat contraction and in the brain they regulate our metabolic, reward and appetite response dependent on the availability of sugar in our blood. So we think these receptors are forming a widespread sensory network throughout the body however these are relatively recent findings so a lot more work is needed to uncover how physiological taste sensing affects our overall health.
How does this hidden sense of taste connect to diet, health, and diseases such as diabetes or lung disease?
There are many different links between taste receptors and human health. One of the most well-understood is the link between taste sensing in the intestine and diabetes. In our digestive system, sweet taste receptors can detect glucose and some artificial sweeteners consumed in our diet and release hormones, such as glucagon like peptide (GLP-1), to increase insulin secretion and manage our blood glucose after a meal.
To accompany this, sweet taste receptors in the pancreas can sense blood glucose levels and amplify the insulin response to ensure that blood glucose does not remain high. However, in people with type 2 diabetes, this signalling is dysregulated resulting in inadequate insulin secretion and consistently high blood glucose levels. Therefore, research is needed to study whether manipulating sweet taste receptors in the intestine or pancreas could form a treatment for type 2 diabetes.
A chest CT scan showing water on the lung in a patient with acute respiratory distress syndrome
A chest CT scan showing water on the lung in a patient with acute respiratory distress syndrome
Your research has helped lead to new patents and a clinical trial — how do discoveries about taste receptors turn into real medical treatments?
This is the area of taste receptor science which we my research team is most interested in understanding. Our studies indicate that activating certain taste receptors can protect the lung against lung injury. Whilst we understand the signalling which causes this protection, we are in the process of investigating what this could mean for patients with lung injury, specifically acute respiratory distress syndrome which is a life-threatening lung condition caused by inflammation and water collecting on the lungs.
This syndrome makes it very difficult for patients to breath properly and therefore they cannot move easily or live their life comfortably, for example, walking up a flight of stairs can be exhausting and painful. Our research suggests that stimulating a taste receptor in lung blood vessels could significantly reduce the formation of water on the lungs, resulting in patients requiring less invasive treatment and having an improved quality of life.
What’s the one idea you hope people take away from this event about taste and the human body?
I think the really cool part of this science is the idea that we can sense taste throughout our body, not just on our tongue. So the one key take away from my talk would be that taste is not just about pleasure—it is a sensory system that helps regulate the whole body. In other words, taste is information, not just an indulgence!
"We think these receptors are forming a widespread sensory network throughout the body however these are relatively recent findings so a lot more work is needed to uncover how physiological taste sensing affects our overall health."
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