Mark Poznansky

Mark Poznansky

Professor of Medicine
Mark Poznansky
I oversee the basic and translational research work of a team of lead investigators, postdoctoral fellows and other trainees who I mentor at the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center (VIC) at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The goal of VIC is to identify novel immune mechanisms and to enable efficient and rapid transition of promising technologies that derive from those scientific discoveries through preclinical development in animal models and the early stages of clinical development. Clinical development is generally done at VIC in close collaboration with technology transfer and involving biotechnology companies.
 
The Center encompasses five research and development programs led by independent principal investigators that collaborate within VIC:
1) The accelerated generation of new vaccines for emerging infectious diseases, including Q fever, influenza and most recently COVID-19.
2) The exploration of novel mechanisms of cancer immune evasion and the development of new immunotherapeutic agents to be used in combination for treatment of ovarian cancer, mesothelioma and head and neck cancer.
3) The development of novel immunomodulatory therapies for the treatment of neurological disorders, including traumatic brain injury, intracerebral hemorrhage and neurodegenerative diseases.
4) The exploration of novel mechanisms by which the immune system can be excluded from or modulated in the context of organ transplantation or diseases in which specific tissues are vulnerable to immune attack - specifically in the contexts of type 1 diabetes.
5) Exploration of novel aspects of the breadth and depth of immune responses in the context of cancer, infectious and immune mediated diseases as detailed above. We have developed a high dimensional immunology (HDI) platform which overarches the three other programs and uses state of the art technologies including transcriptomics, mass cytometry, tissue cytometry and mass spectrometry-based imaging. These high dimensional analytics along with advanced computational approaches allow us to define immune signatures that characterize immune responses in a broad range of human diseases.

Contact Information

Massachusetts General Hospital
Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center, Building 149 Thirteenth Street
Room 5.245
Charlestown, MA 02129
p: 617-724-6375

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