Max Jan, MD, PhD

Massachusetts General Hospital

Academic Titles

Assistant Professor, Pathology, Harvard Medical School

Research Program Affiliation

Member, Developmental Therapeutics

Member, Cancer Immunology

Research Abstract

The Jan laboratory primarily focuses on the development of clinically suitable synthetic biology platforms in order to advance next-generation cellular immunotherapies. We contribute to these goals by harnessing elegant protein degradation cellular machinery that has evolved to control fast biologic transitions related to information flow and signal processing. We have developed molecular switch technologies regulated by the FDA-approved drug lenalidomide as generalizable chemical biology tools and cell therapy controllers. We use genomics, synthetic biology, and cell engineering to build new technologies, explore design principles for adaptive, user-controllable immune cells, and investigate clinical settings to deploy smart cell therapies.