Ragon Institute
Feb 22, 2021
by: Rachel Leeson. Image credit: MRI Scan, courtesy of the NIH. A stroke, like any traumatic event in the body, triggers an immune response and understanding this immune response is critical to improve patient outcomes and nominate new therapeutics. But immune responses in the brain are difficult to study in humans, because the brain is […]
Feb 18, 2021
by: Rachel Leeson; image credit: Illustration from Anatomy & Physiology, Connexions Web site Researchers at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital show that levels of specific antibodies developed in the immune response may influence COVID-19 outcomes in both children and adults. COVID-19, the source of the current pandemic, may […]
Feb 15, 2021
by: Rachel Leeson. Image credit: antibody opsonization, Maher33 While PCR testing has been used widely for COVID-19 diagnosis, it only provides information on who is currently infected. Antibody testing can tell who has been previously exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, a metric that is essential for tracking spread across a population. […]
Feb 10, 2021
by: Rachel Leeson. image credit: HIV on macrophages, Reconfirming the Traditional Model of HIV Particle Assembly. Gross L, PLoS Biology Vol. 4/12/2006, e445. Most HIV-infected cells can be readily killed by immune cells, which recognize and attack infected cells that are making copies of the virus. Ragon postdoc Kiera Clayton, however, found that HIV-infected […]
Feb 3, 2021 Ragon Culture
Ragon Associate director Facundo Batista, PhD, has accepted an appointment as Chief Editor of The EMBO Journal. Batista, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School, succeeds Bernd Pulverer, PhD, Head of Scientific Publishing at EMBO. “I am delighted to serve the wider scientific community by joining The EMBO Journal as Chief Editor,” says Batista. “It is […]
Jan 14, 2021
by: Rachel Leeson One of the most common metaphors used in science is the explanation of DNA as like an alphabet, with the bases of DNA like letters. Ragon Member Bryan Bryson, PhD, along with MIT professor Bonnie Berger, took this metaphor to a whole new level, using natural language processing to predict mutations […]
Dec 22, 2020
image courtesy of the authors Ragon scientists discover dendritic cells help regulate IL-6, a key component in cytokine storms. The cytokine IL-6 is a major driver of immune response and, when present in high levels in the blood, can help drive cytokine storms, such as seen in severe COVID-19 disease. Recently, Ragon scientists […]
Dec 17, 2020
By Claudia Lopez Lloreda, Broad Institute The nervous and immune systems have long been thought to be separate entities in the body, but new research has uncovered a direct cellular interaction between the two. Scientists from Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, MIT, and the Ragon Institute of Mass General, […]
Dec 15, 2020
image credit: broadly neutralizing B12 antibody (green) with an HIV target (red), courtesy of the NIH Image Library and NIAID Ragon scientists find that neutralizing antibody potency predicts severe or fatal COVID-19. Understanding the body’s immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is key to developing effective treatments and long-lasting vaccines. Of […]
Dec 10, 2020
Ragon Institute scientists develop a one-step CRISPR technique to rapidly create mice capable of producing human antibodies To develop vaccines and investigate human immune responses, scientists rely on a variety of animal models, including mice that can produce human antibodies through genetically engineered B cell receptors, which are specialized antibodies bound to the B cell […]
Dec 4, 2020
Image Credit: Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, NIH COVID-19 vaccines are on the near horizon, but many questions on COVID-19 immunity remain for researchers to answer as they work to combat the global pandemic. One major goal is to develop a detailed understanding of what a protective immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, looks […]
Nov 13, 2020 Ragon Culture
The Ragon Institute’s ITEACH program is enlisting local leaders in South Africa’s rural communities to combat COVID-19 ITEACH (Integration of TB in Education and Care for HIV/AIDS), a Ragon Institute program in South Africa, is enlisting leadership within rural communities in the country’s KwaZulu-Natal province to counter a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. By delivering […]
Nov 12, 2020
Image: SARS-CoV-2 virus, courtesy of the NIH For COVID-19, the difference between surviving and not surviving severe disease may be due to the quality, not the quantity, of the patients’ antibody development and response, a new Cell paper published by Ragon Member Galit Alter, PhD, suggests. The study, published in the journal Cell, used Alter’s […]
Oct 6, 2020
Image credit: Influenza virus, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health Ragon and MIT researchers develop computational model to understand drivers of immunodominance; create vaccine strategy in mice that focuses antibody response to universal flu vaccine target. When the body responds to an infection like the flu virus, it […]
Sep 21, 2020
Ragon Institute Associate Director Facundo Batista and MIT Professor Richard Young create new MIT Biology public access COVID-19 course. Image courtesy of MIT Biology and NIAID/Wikimedia Commons With COVID-19 sweeping the nation and the world, biomedical science simultaneously paused and accelerated in unprecedented ways. Many labs were required to shut down during the […]
Aug 31, 2020 Features
Researchers from the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania developed a new Dual CAR T cell immunotherapy that combats HIV infection in humanized mice. Image: HIV infecting a human cell, courtesy of NIH Image library A recent study published in the journal […]