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The Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard Receives Gift from Nancy Zimmerman to Help Fund Development of Early Response COVID-19 Diagnostic

Mar 30, 2020

Boston, March 30, 2020 – The Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard today announced it has received a gift from Nancy Zimmerman to help fund development of an early response coronavirus (COVID-19) diagnostic that would support medical and other front-line professionals and help manage the current pandemic. Specifically, the funding from Ms. Zimmerman, […]

Understanding the Score: A Dynamic Interrogation of Acute HIV Infection

Mar 23, 2020

Alex Shalek, Ragon associate member, has a new study published today in Nature Medicine, Integrated Single-Cell Analysis of Multicellular Immune Dynamics during Hyper-Acute HIV-1 Infection. This study uses single-cell RNA sequencing to understand immune system dynamics after acute HIV infection, with samples provided from the FRESH (Females Rising through Education, Support, and Health) study in […]

New Coronavirus Initiative

Mar 2, 2020

The Ragon Institute, with its commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and patient-focused research, has begun a multipronged approach towards understanding, treating, and preventing infections with the new human coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Ragon Institute scientists are playing  a leadership role in mobilizing an unprecedented Boston-Cambridge consortium dedicated to collaborative efforts to ending the growing pandemic, bringing together Harvard, […]

Alum for the Ride

Feb 21, 2020

  Alum for the Ride   Darrell Irvine, PhD, Ragon Steering Committee Member and MIT Professor of Materials Science and Biological Engineering, has just published a paper in Nature Medicine showing a way to engineer an increased immune response to the vaccine adjuvant aluminum hydroxide, also known as alum, in an HIV vaccine given to […]

Flu Vaccines: Best Supporting Actor?

Jan 6, 2020

Galit Alter has published a new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled “Selective induction of antibody effector functional responses using MF59-adjuvanted vaccination.” This study is taking a new approach to determining flu vaccine efficacy, examining not the antigen, a piece of flu virus that is the main component of the vaccine, but the supporting […]

Machine Learning: the Right Tool for the Right Diagnostic Test

Dec 18, 2019

Ragon faculty member Musie Ghebremichael, PhD, recently published a BMC paper entitled “A comparison of machine learning techniques for classification of HIV patients with antiretroviral therapy-induced mitochondrial toxicity from those without mitochondrial toxicity.” Additional authors include Jong Lee, Elijah Paintsil, and Vivek Gopalakrishnan, of University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Yale University; and The Johns Hopkins University, […]

Into the Spotlight: Towards a Drug-Free Remission

Dec 2, 2019

The Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard received $10 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to move towards drug-free HIV remission.      HIV  HIV remains a major global health challenge, with UNAIDS reporting 37.9 million people living with HIV and 1.7 million new cases each year. Antiretroviral therapy (ART) allows […]

Transformative Approaches to a TB Vaccine

Nov 15, 2019

New research center will help advance TB vaccine development For centuries tuberculosis (TB) has been a major global health problem and the world’s leading infectious killer.  To combat this deadly disease, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently announced new contract awards to establish […]

Groundbreaking HIV vaccine design strategy shows promise in proof-of-principle tests

Nov 1, 2019

A new approach that targets young immune cells may also work for creating vaccines against the flu, dengue, malaria and hepatitis C October 31, 2019 LA JOLLA, CA A collaborative team of scientists has made a successful proof-of-principle demonstration of an advanced HIV vaccine strategy—an approach that may also work in protecting people from an […]

Towards ‘universal’ protection: designing the next-generation influenza vaccine

Oct 21, 2019

Scientists from the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard, led by Dr. Aaron Schmidt, Assistant Professor of Microbiology, have partnered with the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) on a nation-wide, multidisciplinary program to develop a more universally protective influenza vaccine.   The Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers (CIVICs) program, driven and supported by […]

A shot in the arm for vaccine research

Oct 4, 2019

Ragon Institute harnesses new knowledge about HIV to reinvent immunology   Mary Todd Bergman | Harvard Correspondent   Originally posted on The Harvard Gazette, September 19, 2019   With a promising HIV vaccine already in clinical trials, and research revealing how some people can naturally control HIV without medications, the Ragon Institute of Mass General, […]

Germline-encoded affinity for cognate antigen enables vaccine-amplification of a human broadly neutralizing response against influenza virus

Sep 27, 2019

Article originally published on Cell Press, Immunity, September 25, 2019 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2019.09.001 Cambridge, MA. A team of researchers led by Dr. Daniel Lingwood from the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard have investigated how Human broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) against influenza virus can be biased for VHgene usage, suggesting gene-encoded development pathways. Sangesland et […]

Identification Of A Direct Interaction Between NK Cells And A Subset Of HLA Class II Molecules

Aug 5, 2019

News from the HPI Monday, 29. July 2019 Hamburg. A scientific team from the Research Department of Virus Immunology at the Heinrich Pette Institute, Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology (HPI) has investigated the binding of NK cell receptors to HLA class II molecules. The results have now been published in the renowned journal “Nature Immunology”. […]

Studies show early detection, prompt ARV treatment provide hope for the elimination of HIV

Jul 17, 2019

Could early treatment with antiretroviral (ARV) therapy help the body fight off HIV? Researchers affiliated with the Sub-Saharan African Network for TB/HIV Research Excellence (SANTHE) are convinced that early ARV therapy is critical to the treatment of HIV.   Researchers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, South Africa are conducting studies they believe […]

New vaccine strategy boosts T-cell therapy

Jul 11, 2019

Super-charging a treatment for leukemia also makes it effective on solid tumors. Anne Trafton | MIT News Office A promising new way to treat some types of cancer is to program the patient’s own T cells to destroy the cancerous cells. This approach, termed CAR-T cell therapy, is now used to combat some types of […]