An inspiring visit to the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard catching up with Professor Doug Kwon and Meilin Zhu.

Doug’s lab is at the front of the vaginal microbiome field: strain-level work on Lactobacillus, and more recently a Cell Host & Microbe paper on which host and microbial factors determine whether a live biotherapeutic actually colonises and holds. We exchanged updates on where the science is, where the openings are, and the problems the field still hasn’t cracked (mixed in with a few doses of founder war stories…)

The institute itself is an exquisite and deliberate piece of design: a joint enterprise of Mass General Brigham, MIT and Harvard, built to put applied engineering, clinical medicine and biomedical research in the same building and not just the same city. Widely regarded as one of the top destinations for immunologists and biomedical researchers, and you see why within minutes of walking in.

When Terry and Susan Ragon further endowed the institute with $200m in 2019, then Harvard President Larry Bacow described the couple as having 💥optimism and pragmatism in abundance💥 . That combination was evident throughout the building, from everyone working on some of the hardest infectious disease problems there are. Again, an inspiring visit with many takeaways!