Jessica Stark, PhD
New paradigms to engineer immunity
Our goals are to understand how glycans control immune responses and to harness this biology to engineer immunity to diseases like cancer, autoimmunity, and beyond.
Staff
Teaching
Research:
New paradigms to engineer immunity are necessary to address unmet needs in human health. Sugars called glycans coat the surfaces of every cell in our bodies and, as a result, influence nearly every immunological process. However, our ability to identify which glycans control immune responses and design therapies to target them remains limited. The Stark Lab is pioneering approaches to understand and engineer the roles of glycans in the immune system in order to 1) fill key knowledge gaps in immunobiology and 2) develop next-generation immunotherapies. Our work is highly interdisciplinary, integrating approaches from molecular, synthetic, and systems biology, immunology, and biological engineering. We are interested in fundamental questions and therapeutic applications in multiple contexts, including cancer, autoimmunity, and allergy.
Our lab is further committed to training the next generation of scientists through mentoring, outreach, and educational innovation. To support this work, we co-developed and commercialized BioBits® educational kits that promise to increase access to high-quality biology education by facilitating hands-on learning.
Areas I Research
Biography:
Prof. Jessica Stark is an assistant professor in the departments of Biological Engineering and Chemical Engineering and an intramural member of the Koch Institute for integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Her research program seeks to understand how glycans control immune responses and to harness this biology to engineer immunity to disease. As a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University, Stark established a new class of protein therapeutics that makes it possible to target glycans for cancer immunotherapy. This technology is in translation to the clinic via her co-founded company, Valora Therapeutics. During her PhD training with Prof. Michael Jewett at Northwestern University, Stark developed cell-free technologies for protein therapeutic and vaccine production that promise to enable portable and personalized medicine. Previously, she received her B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University and worked at Genentech, Inc. in process development and research and development roles. The Stark Lab’s work has been recognized with an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Prize, a V Scholar Award from The V Foundation, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer Steven A. Rosenberg Scholar Award, and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface.
