Nir Hacohen, PhD, MGH Research Scholar Profile
The lab of MGH Research Scholar Nir Hacohen, PhD, develops new and unbiased strategies to understand basic immune processes and immune-mediated diseases, with an emphasis on the innate immune system and personal medicine.
A Systematic Approach to Dissecting Immune Circuits
MGH Research Scholar 2012-2017
Investigator, Mass General Cancer Center
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
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 personalized medicine.
We address three key questions in immunology:
- How are immune responses against cancer initiated, maintained and evaded?
- What are the immune circuits that sense and control pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria?
- 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.