Ragon Institute

The Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University was founded in 2009 with a dual mission: to contribute to the accelerated discovery of an HIV/AIDS vaccine and to establish itself as a world leader in the collaborative study of immunology. Institute research aims to significantly contribute to a global effort to successfully develop an HIV/AIDS vaccine, and is organized around focused programs in the following areas: adaptive T-cell and B-cell immunity, technology development, virology, computational biology, vaccine/vector design, genetics, basic immunology, and the immunology of memory. The Institute creates non-traditional partnerships among experts with different but complementary backgrounds, providing a means for rapidly funding promising studies and emerging concepts in the field. It integrates key facets of current vaccine development efforts that have tended to follow separate tracks, and provides a substantial pool of accessible, flexible funding that will help lower the threshold for scientists to pursue risky, unconventional avenues of study that are unlikely to attract funding from traditional sources. Such funding will encourage innovation, compress the time it takes to conduct bench-to-bedside research, and attract new minds to the field. The Institute creates a singular opportunity and environment to engage scientists, engineers, and clinicians in challenging research for which there may be no greater benefit—saving lives and curing the ill.