Our new normal – virtual lab meetings!
Lab meeting via Zoom – Doing our bit to defeat COVID-19 – social distancing while developing point of care tests immune tests and a new vaccine
VIC Lab Meeting In The Time of COVID
VIC Pivots to Address COVID-19 Pandemic
We face a time of great uncertainty as a result of the Coronavirus or COVID-19 Pandemic that comes along with unprecedented events of every type, physical, social and economic.
VIC finds itself at the epicenter of this battle against an entirely new foe while being at the forefront of rapid vaccine development for emerging infectious diseases. The VIC team has worked very hard with the US Government and Biotechnology Companies and we have put in place a plan to turn our rapid vaccine development platform, VaxCelerate, towards the development of a safe and effective self-assembling vaccine for COVID-19 and, on a separate front, for the rapid development of a new blood test for the virus.
To begin to turn this wheel we need start-up support in the amount of $500K. Our donors have been amazingly generous over the past 11 years making VIC what is today with 9 new medical products under development, three first in human studies and 3 biotech company spinouts.
Collectively, with your help, we are now in the right place and at the right time to join the battle against the Coronavirus and you should know that your contributions will go directly towards VIC’s mission to assist in the global cause.
Thank you for your support,
Mark C. Poznansky MD, PhD
Get To Know the Key People Behind Beta Cell Replacement Therapy in Boston
Join us for an inside look at the collaborations and skills that researchers in Boston are using to tackle the complex task of replacing beta cells in people with type 1 diabetes (T1D). Beta cell replacement is the art and science of taking or making beta cells from outside a person’s body, and then putting those new cells inside a person to replace their own damaged or destroyed beta cells. Funding beta cell replacement research is also one of JDRF’s most critical undertakings, essential in our mission to find cures for T1D.
Read about our 2019 successes in the VIC Holiday Letter
Message from the Director
Dr. Mark C. Poznansky
Dear Friends of VIC – 2019 has been a very exciting and productive year for us. We set out at the beginning of the year to achieve four new and key goals: to bring the B cell immunotherapy study to first in human testing; to expand the Q fever vaccine and islet transplantation development studies; to develop a new research program around high dimensional immunology or HDI. In 12 short months we have achieved all of these goals with the tremendous help of the core senior scientific team including Drs. Reeves, Chen, Alagpulinsa and Sîrbulescu and our amazing Associate Director, Dr. Ann Sluder and Project and Administrative Manager, Phoebe Ingram. These individual stories of research success are detailed below, and I hope that you will find time to read them. We continue to attract funding support from US government agencies, private foundations and biotech companies but none of this work could be completed in this expedited time frame without the tremendous support of our philanthropic donors. I will call out a couple of highlights of the year in addition, relating to the Melvyn Field Innovation Award which went to Dr. Sîrbulescu this year for her pioneering and visionary work on the role of B cells in tissue regeneration and the Will Tankard Junior Scientist Award to Skylar Korek for his outstanding work on the High Dimensional Immunology program. Our invited Prof. Dulcie Coleman lecturer this year was Prof. Ann Leen from the University of Texas who gave an outstanding talk about her novel cell therapy for viral infections that occur in immune suppressed patients. Finally, I would like to thank all our donors who have made this possible and brought VIC so successfully into its 11th year of existence since its foundation in 2008.
Novel B Cell Immunotherapy for First Clinical Indication Goes First in Human.
A huge step forward was achieved at VIC, taking the entirely serendipitous discovery made by Dr. Ruxandra Sîrbulescu that B cells from the blood could both protect and enhance the regeneration of tissues, to a first in human study of safety in under a year. This work was then transitioned to the exploration of the use of B cells to facilitate healing in the brain following traumatic injury. This work and findings are part of protected intellectual property. Dr. Sîrbulescu discovered that B cells could enhance tissue regeneration and augment healing and reduce brain damage in mouse models of this disease. These remarkable and subsequently published findings were then fast tracked to first in human studies – primarily of safety in a patient. The essence of getting this complex project done was teamwork managed at VIC and involving scientists, physiciansandnursesattheMGHandDFCI. Noneofthis work, from bench to bedside could have been completed without generous philanthropic support particularly from the Ward Family Foundation.
Q-VaxCelerate Program to Initiate Second International Consortium for Vaccine Studies
The VIC-led international Q-VaxCelerate consortium, with funding from the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), continues to advance the development of a novel vaccine for Q fever. A potentially debilitating bacterial disease that can be transmitted from small livestock such as sheep and goats, Q fever is of concern for troops deployed to the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as for workers in the livestock industry. Building on the immunological studies of the current program, VIC has received notification of new DTRA funding for a study to characterize more fully the immune responses to an existing Q fever vaccine used in Australia, which although effective can cause significant reactive side effects. The results of this study will guide clinical assessment of new vaccines designed to avoid the side effects.
Beta Cell Transplantation for Type 1 Diabetes Without Immune Suppression Advances with the Continuing Support of JDRF.
The team of scientists at VIC has led the way in developing a new and relatively simple system for implanting insulin producing human stem cell derived beta cells (from Dr. Douglas Melton’s laboratory at Harvard) into small and large diabetic animals without the need to suppress the recipient animal’s immune system. With the tremendous support of JDRF, Dr. David Alagpulinsa and Michael Chapin have worked with Dr. James Markmann and Dr. Ji Lei from Transplant Surgery at MGH to explore the use of this approach in a large animal model of diabetes. To date we have demonstrated long term survival and function of these transplanted beta cells without the need for additional medication and a greatly reduced need for insulin injections. JDRF has seen fit to expand our initial work in small numbers of large animals and this expansion phase of the study is currently under way. This work could not have been completed without seamless collaboration between the Melton and Markmann teams integrated with VIC’s efforts. VIC’s work in the beta cell transplantation arena has been featured by JDRF at meetings and on its website which can be viewed here.
New High-Dimensional Immunology (HDI) Program to Build Comprehensive Pictures of Immune Responses in Human Disease
A new initiative that has been accelerated by philanthropic support, the VIC HDI program, takes a wholistic approach to understanding human inflammatory and immune responses. The overall program objective is to develop new diagnostics and tools that can inform clinical decisions and guide therapeutic discovery and development. Using multiple state of the art high-parameter technologies, emphasis is placed on maximizing the information obtained from small clinical samples of blood or tissue. VIC HDI scientists have developed proprietary computational strategies and use public domain and proprietary algorithms for analyzing multiple types of high- dimensional data and for identifying specific immune system responses associated with clinical measures and outcomes. Current active projects address a variety of clinical areas, including infectious disease vaccines, the immune microenvironment in solid tumors, immune system changes following organ transplantation or traumatic injury, and immune dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases and type 1 diabetes.
Staff and Investigators at VIC wish you all a wonderful Holiday Season and thank you for your generosity the last year!
New York Times Op-ed: This Is the Truth About Vaccines
While there are certainly thoughts, ideas and technologies progressing rapidly in the United States today, it remains that there are many Americans who do not vaccinate themselves and/or their children. Recently, there have been so few cases of these “ancient” diseases that people often underestimate their ability to contract such diseases. Further, since the publishing […]
Continue readingJDRF & the Will Tankard Scholarship
I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) when I was 9 years old. One day I was a considered a healthy child and the next I was I learning how to manage a life-changing and chronic disease. My parents were bombarded with books and other resources on how to treat my disease and how […]
Continue reading2018 Inaugural Professor Dulcie Coleman Lecture
On May 3rd, 2018 the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center(VIC) at MGH hosted the inaugural Professor Dulcie Coleman lecture in the historic Ether Dome at MGH in Boston. This lecture series, which will take place annually, is hosted by Dr. Mark C. Poznansky, Director of VIC, in memory of his mother, Professor Dulcie Coleman, a pre-eminent scientist […]
Continue readingFriends of VIC Summer Gathering
Dr. Mark Poznansky, Director of VIC, hosted an evening of dinner and conversation for the Friends of VIC, our generous donors and supporters. The event took place in the elegant Trustees dining room at MGH. Prior to the dinner, guests were given a guided tour of the historic Ether Dome as shown in the photo. […]
Continue readingThe Epic Duo: Doctors and Data
In many of the “superhero” stories of our culture, from Batman and Robin to Sherlock and Watson, a superhero has an indispensable sidekick. Now, some real-life superheroes, notably doctors, are being paired up with a new sidekick, artificial intelligence (AI), that also may prove to be indispensable. This new dynamic duo might be the best […]
Continue readingDulcie Coleman Award 2017
Time flies when you’re having fun, or so they say, and three months at VIC have gone by in a flash. It’s hard to believe my time here has drawn to a close! In the time that I’ve been here, I’ve explored the beautiful city of Boston, gotten to know many excellent scientists at VIC, […]
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