Nir Hacohen PhD

Dr. Hacohen is Director of the Center for Cancer Immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital, David P. Ryan Professor at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Center for Cell Circuits at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His group uses systems-level approaches to discover molecular and cellular mechanisms of immunity and to design personalized immunotherapies.

Using genetic and biochemical approaches, his group identified factors (such as signaling, transcription, splicing and chromatin regulators, as well as non-coding elements and variants) that underlie pathogen sensing and host-pathogen interactions.

He has contributed to the Human Cell Atlas by discovering new cell types, including human dendritic cell subsets and their progenitors, T cell activation states, and disease-associated immune cell states (from patients with bacterial/viral sepsis, lupus nephritis and cancer).

These studies led to the discovery of spatially-organized immune cell hubs within tumors. His group is reverse-translating these findings from human diseases to mouse models, with the goal of identifying therapeutic targets conserved across species.

He and his collaborators developed some of first personalized vaccines to target tumor-specific neoantigens in patients with melanoma and glioblastoma, and continue to innovate methods to discover, predict and induce responses against personalized tumor antigens.