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Current News

Thumbi Ndung'u awarded HHM International Early Career Scientist
Thumbi Ndung'u, PhD., Scientific Director of the HIV Pathogenesis Programme is named one of 28 international winners of HHMI's International Early Career Scientists program.

HPP Holds First Annual World AIDS Day Event
The theme of HIV Pathogenesis Programme 's (HPP) first annual World AIDS Day event, held December 2011, was an "Update on progress made towards the development of a safe and effective HIV vaccine.

Alternative funding: Sponsor my science
"I think we as a scientific community don't do a great job in articulating the transformational power of philanthropy. But that funding has allowed me to do things that I never could have considered if I'd been trying to do it through traditional sources." - Bruce Walker, Ragon Institue

read Nature article

Promising Results Shown in Novel Combination HIV Vaccine
Preclinical study of HIV vaccine candidates provides strong rationale for clinical trials

New vaccine research suggests that scientists are homing in on the critical ingredients of a protective HIV vaccine and identifies new HIV vaccine candidates to test in human clinical trials.

Ragon and Dartmouth collaborate to tailor new vaccine approach against HIV
An international consortium led by investigators from the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and from Dartmouth have been awarded approximately $8 million in support of an effort to develop a new type of HIV vaccine.

Photograph by David Phillips/Visuals Unlimited

Ragon Institute Research Named in Boston Magazine's Top 14 Medical Breakthroughs

Spam Filters and HIV
How Microsoft Research is using technology used in spam filters is helping researchers at the Ragon Institute to quantify how the immune system attacks various fragments of HIV, by analyzing data sent from the Ragon team in Africa.

"When we first met Bruce, he had a very tricky problem to analyze.
He had this great data set but he didn’t know how to analyze it. We happened to have just the right algorithm for it and this large bank of computers at Microsoft that could do this massive amount of computation. He gave us the problem on Friday. On Monday, we had a completed analysis for him."
- David Heckerman, Microsoft Research

Learn more:
		Uncovering New Ways the Human Immune System Fights HIV - Microsoft Research
		Now HIV to face computer program - Times Live (South Africa)
		Fighting Email Spam Is Helping Search For HIV Vaccine - Steve Clayton for psfk
		Microsoft Research applying spam-fighting techniques to attack HIV - The Verge
		Microsoft and spam filtering may be leading the fight against HIV - Digital Trends
		Microsoft explores connection between spam filtering and HIV - Tech Flash

	Is an HIV Vaccine Possible? For World AIDS Day, December 1, Dr. Bruce Walker reflects on for the progress toward an AIDS vaccine. On December 2, Dr. Walker will moderate a session on the topic at the AIDS@30 International Symposium

Ragon Institute Fellows Recieve 2011 MGH ECOR Award
Srinka Ranasinghe, PhD and Filippos Porichis, PhD were awarded the MGH Executive Committee on Research (ECOR) Fund for Medical Discovery.

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Bill Gates meets with Ragon Institute faculty
On November 11, Bill Gates, founder of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world, dedicated to bringing innovations in health, development, and learning to the global community, met with Ragon Institute Director, Dr. Bruce Walker and members of the Ragon Steering Committee and faculty to discuss research at the Ragon Institute.

Pictured left to right: Bruce Walker, M.D. (MGH); Marcus Altfeld, M.D., Ph.D. (HMS); Arup K. Chakraborty, Ph.D. (MIT); Bill Gates, Dan Barouch, M.D., Ph.D. (BIDMC); Laurie Glimcher, M.D. (HMS); Joseph G. Sodroski, B.S. M.D. (Dana-Farber); Ulrich H. von Andrian, M.D. (HMS).

The Tuberculosis and HIV Epidemic in South Africa and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV
Tuberculosis is a global emergency that is responsible for 2 million deaths annually and is one of the leading causes of death among curable infectious diseases. In many African countries, the tuberculosis and HIV epidemics fuel each other.

Ragon Institute researchers in South Africa discuss the state of the epidemics in the hardest-hit areas of South Africa. Read the Journal of Infectious Diseases article. (may require log-in)

Monitoring how T cells respond to HIV
New technology measures multiple aspects of individual T cells’ responses to HIV-infected cells, including their ability to kill them. The technology could make it easier to monitor and design vaccines against HIV.

		read MIT News article
		read JCI article: A high-throughput single-cell analysis of human CD8+ T cell functions reveals discordance for cytokine secretion and cytolysis
		watch video: T cells attack HIV-infected cells

AIDS Vaccine 2012 Video
Ragon Institute and the Harvard CFAR will host the AIDS Vaccine 2012 conference in Boston next year. It is expected that the conference will attract more than 1,000 researchers, clinicians, and community advocates from around the world.

Immune Responses Select for Mutations that Significantly Impair Hepatitis C Virus Replication
Two new studies reveal that a key phenomenon of an individual’s ability to control Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) is their ability to target critical regions of the virus. read more

HIV Under Control
Elite HIV controllers have nearly undetectable levels of the virus

Now that some people have been living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) for decades, a unique phenomenon is emerging: patients who have not progressed to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)
read the HemAware article

(image via naturalkillercells.org)

Natural killer cells participate in immune response against HIV
Better understanding cells' activity may contribute to new treatment, prevention strategies

Researchers at the Ragon Institute and Microsoft Research collaborate to demonstrate for the first time that natural killer (NK) cells, which are part of the body's first-line defence against infection, can contribute to the immune response against HIV.

In an article in the August 4 issue of Nature, the research team reports that the HIV strains infecting individuals with particular receptor molecules on their NK cells had variant forms of key viral proteins, implying that the virus had mutated to avoid NK cell activity.

Nature article (may require subscription) / MGH news release

AV 2012 Organizers Meet with Governor
On Monday, AIDS Vaccine 2012 conference orgnizers, Lindsey Robert Baden, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine (BWH), Dan H. Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine (BIDMC) and Galit Alter, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Medicine (HMS) met with Governor Deval Patrick to discuss the conference which will be held in Boston in 2012.

AIDS Vaccine is the world's largest and most prestigious scientific conference focused exclusively on HIV vaccine research. The 2012 conference sheduled to be held in Boston is expected to attract more than 1,000 researchers, clinicians, and community advocates from around the world.
press release (pdf) The 2011 AIDS Vaccine conference will be held in Bangkok, Thailand.

Ragon Co-Sponsors Grant Writing Workshop at University of Zambia

Four-day workshop on scientific writing, grantsmanship and research mentorship advances skills of Zambian researchers. read more

New Math in HIV Fight
Statistical Method Evolves From Physics to Wall Street to Battle Against AIDS

Features the work of Arup Chakraborty and Bruce Walker
read the Wall Street Journal article

Vaccines: His best shot
Can Bruce Walker transform HIV vaccine research?

The May 25, 2011 isssue of Nature magazine discusses the establishment of the Ragon Institute and the current state of vaccine development. read the Nature article / download pdf

Kwon Awarded 2011 Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists
Burroughs Wellcome Award for Medical Scientists funds technologies to prevent HIV infection in women

Ragon Institute Investigator, Douglas Kwon M.D. Ph.D., is one of ten physician scientists awarded the Career Award for Medical Scientists through the Burroughs Wellcome Fund this year. read more

Important step in breakdown of HIV proteins is critical to immune system recognition, destruction of infected cells

Dr. Sylvie Le Gall's laboratory has discovered a key step in the processing of HIV within cells which appears to affect how effectively the immune system's killer T cells can recognize and destroy infected cells. Their report appears in the June Journal of Clinical Investigation. / press release (pdf)