NEWS

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 MGH, MIT […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Researchers from the Ragon Institute of MGH, 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 Nature […]

Single VH Gene Allows for Broad-Spectrum Antibody Response to LPS   Image: Immunoglobulin heavy chain variable domain, VH   Daniel Lingwood, PhD, Ragon Group Leader, recently published a paper in Cell Reports entitled, “A single human VH gene allows for a broad-spectrum antibody response targeting 2 bacterial lipopolysaccharides in the blood.” This paper, whose lead […]

Ragon Institute researchers show elite controllers have HIV viral reservoirs in gene deserts which may help prevent viral rebound and contribute to natural control of HIV.   

Image: Germinal centers in a lymph node, courtesy of Shiv Pillai Lack of germinal centers in COVID-19 immune response may prevent patients from developing long-lasting immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus Shiv Pillai, MD, Ph.D, Member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and professor at Harvard Medical School, recently published a paper in […]

Results of partnership between the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and UW Medicine identify five markers of the humoral immune response that may be able to predict COVID-19 patient outcomes.   A recent study published in Immunity identifies five immune response markers which, collectively, were able to correctly classify both convalescent COVID-19 patients […]

by: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center   Findings lay groundwork for clinical development program     Boston, Mass. – The development of a safe and effective vaccine will likely be required to end the COVID-19 pandemic. A group of scientists, led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) immunologist Dan H. Barouch, MD, PhD, now report […]

Image: Immune cells in malaria patient. Credit: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH   Researchers at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, in collaboration with the global health non-profit PATH and pharmaceutical company GSK, have discovered two markers of immunity in response to the RTS,S/ASO1 malaria vaccine that correlated strongly with […]