Michael Birnbaum
@MEBirnbaum
Immune Engineer. @MITdeptofBE @kochinstitute @ragoninstitute
My department (MIT Biological Engineering) is hiring at the Assistant Professor level! We are looking for someone in immunology/immunotherapy/immune engineering, broadly defined. be.mit.edu/about/open-fac…
Welcome to the team!!
I’m beyond thrilled to share that I will be joining the @MIT Department of Biological Engineering @MITdeptofBE as an Assistant Professor in January 2026! I will also be an intramural member of the legendary Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT @kochinstitute
Our Director, Discovery Research, Russell McConnell, will be at @ASGCTherapy to discuss preclinical data that supports the promise of our iGPS gene delivery system to develop #invivo therapeutics for congenital & infectious diseases. Learn more: keloniatx.com/kelonia-therap… #ASGCT2025
One year into our TCR-based challenge, I can say already that leading a #CancerGrandchallenges team may the most scientifically rewarding thing I have done. Amazing way to do impactful, international research on very hard problems!
📢 Announcing 7 new #CancerGrandChallenges 📢 We're thrilled to announce 7 new challenges, now open for Expressions of Interest from global, interdisciplinary teams. Awards of up to £20m ($25m) are available. Discover the new challenges: bit.ly/3WY6Rxn
Deeper and noninvasive metabolic imaging powered by multimode fiber sources by Kunzan Liu, Tong Qiu, Honghao Cao. Awesome collaboration with @LindaGGriffith1 Fan Wang @rdkamm science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… news.mit.edu/2024/noninvasi…
We’re in Boston for the 1st annual meeting of the @CancerGrand Challenges MATCHMAKERS team! The team, which we sponsor with @CR_UK & @theNCI, is creating tools to predict T cell antigen specificity, which could unlock more effective immunotherapies. cancergrandchallenges.org/challenges/act…
Thrilled to announce Boltz-1, the first open-source and commercially available model to achieve AlphaFold3-level accuracy on biomolecular structure prediction! An exciting collaboration with @jeremyWohlwend, @pas_saro and an amazing team at MIT and Genesis Therapeutics. A thread!
Congratulations David Baker (@UW, member of #CancerGrandChallenges team MATCHMAKERS), who's won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work building new kinds of proteins! 👏 More about MATCHMAKERS, funded by @CR_UK @theNCI @TheMarkFdn 👉 cancergrandchallenges.org/matchmakers
It's not easy to get hold of a newly awarded Nobel Prize laureate! We are happy that chemistry laureate David Baker took our call, as he turned down "100 calls" while he was on the phone with us. Hold tight for our upcoming interview with Baker.
I am excited to share our @NatureComms paper describing the structure of #LAG3 bound to MHC-II. This project was carried out by @SuperMQQ et al at @MoffittResearch and provides new insights into the mechanism by which LAG3 suppresses T cell activation. nature.com/articles/s4146…
Library-based single-cell analysis of CAR signaling reveals drivers of in vivo persistence biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_immuno
Very proud of this work by @calebrperez! Elegantly combining elements of CAR screening and single cell genomics to give insight into how CAR composition affects T cell functional state, with a lot to learn about how to design CARs and the diversity possible for T cell function
Excited to share some of my PhD work was pre-printed! Using single-cell sequencing, we took a deep look at a library of CAR signaling architectures to try to identify signal-intrinsic drivers of CAR-T function🧵👇 @MEBirnbaum @kochinstitute @MITdeptofBE biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Flow/CyTOF users and leaders: here is an interface that allows you to see exactly where a given cell on a biaxial plot is on a corresponding UMAP. More details:
Lots of people in CS are (almost surely) GPT-ing their peer reviews arxiv.org/abs/2403.07183
What a ride to be leading this effort to solve T cell recognition - incredible opportunity and team, and 5 years to throw everything we have at it. Thanks @CancerGrand @theNCI @TheMarkFdn for the award - and @kochinstitute @MITdeptofBE @ragoninstitute for the continual support
The second winning @CancerGrand team featured at the #CancerGrandChallenges Summit is Team MATCHMAKERS (T-Cell Receptors challenge) led by @MEBirnbaum (@MITdeptofBE) - congratulations!
I will keep maxing out these nonsense categories until grad programs phase them out.
Two-dose "extended priming" immunization amplifies humoral immune responses by synchronizing vaccine delivery with the germinal ... biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_immuno
🚨🧬💉Everything you wanted to know about TCR therapies* (*but were afraid to ask). Check out our new review in @NatRevDrugDisc 👇. A wonderful collaboration between @KlebanoffLab, @ND_BakerLab, @QuezadaLab, and @ToniRibas12. @MSKCancerCenter @parkerici rdcu.be/dpCtp