Stark Lab at MIT

The Stark Lab seeks to understand and engineer the roles of cell-surface sugars in the immune system. New paradigms to harness the immune system are necessary to address unmet needs in human health. Sugars called glycans coat the surface of every cell and, as a result, influence nearly every immunological process. The lab is pioneering approaches to explore glycoimmunology as a frontier area of immunobiology and immunotherapy.

The Lab is developing enabling biotechnologies to realize the largely untapped potential of glycans for immunological discovery and therapeutic translation. Work is highly interdisciplinary, integrating approaches from synthetic biology, systems biology, immunology, and biological engineering.

(*) Translational Glycoimmunology -- Glycans profoundly influence immune responses, representing attractive targets for immunotherapy. However, the vast majority of glycans cannot be targeted with existing therapeutic modalities. New molecular classes of immunotherapies are being developed that block or simulate glycan binding to address therapeutic needs in cancer, infection, and autoimmunity.

(*) Systems Glycoimmunology -- The goal is to understand: which glycans influence the immune system and in which contexts? While we know that glycan structures are altered in disease, the precise identities of glycans that drive pathology through immune modulation are largely unknown. We are engineering platforms to discover immunomodulatory glycans in primary human samples. This work promises to fill key knowledge gaps in human immunobiology and inform design of glycan-targeted immunotherapies.