Director Center for Cancer Immunology, Massachusetts General Hospital

Investigator, Full Prof (M) KFCCR Faculty, Mass General Research Institute

Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

MGH Research Scholar 2012-2017 Mass General Research Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital

Institute Member Broad Institute

antigens neoplasm; cancer immunotherapy; dendritic cells; endodeoxyribonucleases; fms-like tyrosine kinase 3; host-pathogen interactions; immune system; immunity innate; immunogenetics; immunology; influenza a virus h1n1 subtype; interferon regulatory factor-7; lymphocyte subsets; rna small interfering; single-cell analysis; systems biology; toll-like receptors; viruses

The Hacohen lab consists of immunologists, geneticists, biochemists, technologists and computational biologists working together to develop new and unbiased strategies to understand basic immune processes and immune-mediated diseases, with an emphasis on the innate immune system and personal medicine.

We address three key questions in immunology:

(1) How are immune responses against cancer initiated, maintained and evaded?
(2) What are the immune circuits that sense and control pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria?
(3) How does immunity against the body develop, in particular, in patients with autoimmune lupus?

In addition to discovering and studying specific molecular and cellular mechanisms, we also address how and why the immune response (to tumors, pathogens or self) varies so dramatically across individuals. Finally, we are adapting our unbiased analytical strategies into real-world therapeutics, having initiated clinical trials (with our collaborator Dr. Catherine Wu) in which patients are vaccinated against their own tumors with a fully personal vaccine that is designed based on a computational analysis of their personal tumor genome.