About

The Ragon Institute was officially established in February 2009 at MGH, MIT and Harvard with a donation of $100 million from Terry and Susan Ragon. Our mission is to contribute to the accelerated discovery of a HIV/AIDS vaccine and to establish itself as a world leader in the collaborative study of immunology. The institute is structured and positioned to significantly contribute to the field of immunology and efforts against global disease.

• Creating non-traditional partnerships among experts with different but complementary backgrounds (e.g., engineers, basic immunologists, computational biologists, immunogeneticists, clinicians)
• Providing a means for rapidly funding promising studies (e.g., elite controllers, innovative viral vectors) and emerging concepts in the field (e.g., innate immune system memory);
• Integrating key facets of current vaccine development efforts that have tended to follow separate tracks (e.g., seeking a combined antibody and T-cell solution)
• Providing a substantial pool of accessible, flexible funding that will help lower the threshold for scientists to pursue risky, unconventional avenues of study that are unlikely to attract funding from traditional sources. Such funding will encourage innovation, compress the time it takes to conduct bench-to-bedside research and attract new minds to the field.

Now, with a HIV vaccine in clinical trials, we have broadened our focus to apply the lessons we’ve learned from HIV to the immune system and its interface with other global infectious diseases. Our next stage, one which uses the innovative approach and scientific knowledge gained from our start in HIV, is as exciting and impactful as where we started.