Company Description

Michael Farzan’s laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School engineers lymphocytes – B cells and T cells – for a range of scientific and translational goals. For example, this technology allows us to use murine germinal centers to select potent and highly bioavailable human antibodies. It also provides us useful animal models to evaluate and improve vaccines, as well as a new way to address unanswered questions in lymphocyte-cell biology and adaptive immunity. Finally, the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) B cells and CD4-positive CAR T cells so generated can themselves be conceived of as a therapy for many disease states including HIV infection. Because our engineered B cells affinity mature, we apply them to our efforts to predict uniquely human responses to candidate vaccines in mice and non-human primates. This tool is critical for our parallel efforts to develop novel antigens that elicit antibodies in humans t...