Dr. Poznansky is an expert physician scientist and medical innovator who has combined these expertise together to found and direct the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center (VIC) at Massachusetts General Hospital. VIC supports accelerated bench to bedside research and the development of novel vaccines and immunotherapies for cancer, infectious and immune mediated diseases. His expertise is in immunology and, in particular, immune cell migration. He discovered fugetaxis, the principle of immuno-repulsion or the active movement of immune cells away from an agent source, that forms the basis of his academic research at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory defined the molecular mechanism for this novel immune process and explores the relevance of this mechanism to new therapeutic approaches to cancer, infectious diseases and type 1 diabetes.
Under his leadership, VIC now supports four R and D programs: in infectious diseases (including COVID-19, Q fever and Influenza), cancer (including mesothelioma, ovarian and cervical cancer) and a regenerative medicine based program for immune mediated diseases (including type 1 diabetes and ALS). In addition, VIC also supports a cutting edge high dimensional immunology and associated computational biology program that now underpins much of the work at VIC. Dr. Poznansky is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Attending Physician in Infectious Diseases Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
He was awarded a Harrison Watson Fellowship to do his PhD at Cambridge University and a Harkness Fellowship to do postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School in the USA. While in the UK he also served as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps (V). He completed his post-doctoral research training in retrovirology at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He completed his infectious diseases fellowship training at Imperial College in London and at Harvard Medical School in the Longwood Program.
- BSc (Hons), Pathology, University of Edinburgh, UK
- MB, ChB Medicine, University of Edinburgh, UK
- PhD, Medical Sciences, Cambridge University, UK
Dr. Poznansky is the scientific founder of five biotech companies and served as the Co-Director of the Medicine Innovation Program at MGH and currently serves as a member of the Partners Commercialization Council. He was recently honored as one of the Cancer-One Hundred by the MGH Cancer Center for contributions to the development of new vaccines and immunotherapies for cancer and a Partners in Excellence Award for his clinical services to MGH. He is the current president of the Medical Exchange Club and a scientific advisor to several organizations and serves on the grant review board for the JDRF and other national and international grant giving organizations.