Michael Birnbaum

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…

It’s hard not to get addicted to this. From side conversations with @MEBirnbaum to an incredible result for patients. So proud of the Kelonia team for all the hard work it took to make this real.

I came to MIT to study in 1983 to pursue a PhD in the then-emerging field of Biochemical Engineering. Having arrived in North America a political refugee from war-torn Lebanon eight years earlier, the academic rigor of MIT courses and professors challenged me at a whole new level, and through those challenges, taught me what I was capable of achieving. It is safe to say my career trajectory – which has included co-founding more than 100 companies that have between them employed more than 20,000 American citizens over the last twenty five years – is due in large part to MIT opening its doors to me, encouraging me to use my voice and test the limits of my abilities, and rewarding my hard work and scientific achievement. Opening doors; protecting free speech; rewarding merit: these are MIT’s values, and I consider them to be the bedrock tenets of the United States, my adopted home. I stand proud of my alma mater, as an alumnus and a member of its board. nytimes.com/2025/10/10/us/…

In vivo CAR-T cell therapy nature.com/articles/s4157… rdcu.be/eI7zH This new Review discusses how technological advances that remove the need for ex vivo manipulation and chemotherapeutic conditioning could enable wider application of CAR-T cell therapies

So excited for Kelonia to have made this milestone!

Welcome to the team!!

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!

@timhwang Nowhere near enough being amalgamated these days tbh

My industrial-era artificial intelligence conglomerate: US Token & Weights Corporation

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

TCR repertoire dream: decoding immune status by sequencing TCRs. Problems: 1) Need paired TCRab chains 2) Interesting T cell clones are often VERY small. Our solution: TIRTL-seq 🐢Deep, quantitative, & affordable paired TCR repertoire sequencing. 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.110… (1/11)

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…

Engineering background not strictly necessary (after all, they hired me!) so long as you are quantitative/building tools/goal-oriented. MIT is truly a special place to work - please spread the word as we look for someone to join us.

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…

@DrJuanLMendoza typical!

@MEBirnbaum somehow I was not following or maybe I unfollowed you at one point 😆

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