Led by Wyss Institute Core Faculty member David Mooney, Ph.D., and F. Stephen Hodi, Jr., M.D., Director of the Melanoma Center and The Center for Immuno-Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Dana-Farber), world-leading cancer immunologists and bioengineers from the Wyss Institute, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Dana-Farber, Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and Massachusetts General Hospital formed an NIH-funded Immuno-Engineering to Improve Immunotherapy (i3) Center. The cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary i3 Center is creating new biomaterials-based approaches to enable anti-cancer immuno-therapies in settings where their use is currently limited, such as in myeloid malignancies and solid tumors.
The i3 Center is part of NIH’s Cancer ‘Moonshot Initiative’, which was formed to accelerate cancer research and make more therapies available to more patients, while also improving cancer prevention and early stage detection.
We aim to develop new technologies that induce robust anti-cancer T cell immunity, and we also hope that the i3 Center’s highly cross-disciplinary and cross-fertilizing mechanisms will provide a center of gravity for many future efforts in the immuno-therapy space across and beyond our collaborating institutions.
The collaborators have previously made major contributions to the development of checkpoint blockade therapy, neoantigen vaccines, cellular therapies, DNA nanotechnologies and therapeutic biomaterials, and are bundling their diverse experiences to enable major scientific and translational advances in cancer immunotherapy.