Massachusetts General Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based research enterprise in the U.S., with nearly $1.3 billion in research operations in 2023. The Mass General Research Institute comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments.
But what do each of these groups do? Learn more about the individual labs and centers in our #ThroughTheMagnifyingGlass series, where we take a closer look at the teams that make up the Mass General Research Institute.
In this post, we are highlighting the Boland Lab led by Genevieve M. Boland, MD, PhD!
Dr. Boland is director of the Melanoma & Skin Cancer Surgery Program at the Mass General Cancer Center, a physician investigator in the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research, an associate professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Emma and Bill Roberts MGH Research Scholar 2023-2028.
Learn more about the lab below.
What research do you perform, and why is it unique?
In the Boland Lab, we use the latest technology to analyze patient-derived materials, including tumors and blood samples, to better comprehend interactions between tumors and the immune system. Our goal is to improve the care of cancer patients through a deeper understanding of these interactions.
Our lab is unique in our ability to conducting studies directly from the clinic to the laboratory bench. While many groups follow a “bench-to-bedside” model, we focus on “bedside-to-bench” research, maintaining clinical relevance and increasing the likelihood of immediate improvements in cancer patient care.
We have expanded our analytical pipelines beyond cutaneous (skin) melanoma to other rare melanoma types that do not respond to our best, current therapies. We are also excited to explore new emerging immunotherapies, such as adoptive T cell therapies, to understand both response and resistance in these unique patient populations.
Meet the Team
The people in our lab make it an amazing place to be and work. They are smart, humble, hard-working and fun-loving. Our lab members are diverse in background, skill sets and career pathways. This allows for peer-to-peer learning and mentorship as well as a fun and supportive team dynamic. I’m grateful to have such an amazing group of researchers on our team.
What truly enhances the effectiveness of our team is a parallel system of structure and inquiry. A segment of our lab is dedicated to managing the infrastructure and “machinery” for the biorepository work. Through these efforts and resources, we can then pose and address meaningful clinical questions with biological, molecular and immunologic answers.
What publication is really important to your ongoing research?
In our recent publication, Evolution of delayed resistance to immunotherapy in a melanoma responder, we follow the nine-year trajectory of one of my own patients, delineating the evolution of treatment response and resistance over time. It is meaningful to me, personally, as well as an example of how deep analysis of individual patients can yield meaningful findings.
How does your research apply to everyday people's lives?
We are learning in real-time why some patients do better or worse after their cancer diagnosis. This is important in prognosis (risk stratification) to pair patients with therapies that will help them, personally, and spare them therapies or treatments that will not benefit them.
Additionally, we are thinking about how to create new tools for diagnosis, risk stratification, and new therapies. We’re working to create a truly personalized, or patient-specific, care algorithm where an individual patient’s biology informs the next steps of their clinical care.
What is something you wish everyone knew about the research you perform?
We intentionally align our research project with the clinical care of patients. As our clinical algorithms change, so do our investigations. We aim to keep our studies directly relevant to patient care, and hopefully conduct studies that are pushing the needle of clinical care forward.
About the Mass General Research Institute
Massachusetts General Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based research program in the United States. Our researchers work side-by-side with physicians to develop innovative new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease.
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