Center for Integrated Solutions for Infectious Diseases

The Challenge

Infectious diseases are uniquely challenging and complicated to manage because:

  • They arise from a complex interplay involving diverse pathogens, highly variable human hosts, and the enormous microbiome, leading to a wide spectrum of responses and thus outcomes to both infection and therapy.
  • The rapid evolution of pathogens allows them to subvert immunity and develop resistance to therapeutics.
  • Finding the pathogen in the infected individual, and distinguishing it from potentially benign, colonizing microbes, makes diagnosis a challenge.
  • The often quick progression of disease leaves little time to diagnose the infection and make informed decisions about management and treatment.
  • The transmissibility of infectious diseases creates urgency for diagnosis and management, with public health ramifications.
Integrated Solutions for Infectious Diseases

Who We Are

CISID leverages and develops expertise, synergies, and infrastructures across the MIT, Harvard, and Harvard teaching hospital ecosystems. Academic labs, Innovation labs, and Clinical Research Units closely collaborate with a shared mission of translating fundamental research into tangible benefits for patients.

  • In our academic labs, established and junior scientific and clinical investigators with expertise across chemistry, microbiology, immunology, metabolism, computation, structural biology, biochemistry, and genetics tackle fundamental biological questions in infectious diseases that can inform the development of novel strategies for diagnosing, treating and managing patients.
  • In our Innovation Labs, technological pioneers build and scale cutting-edge methods to provide unprecedented views into the processes of infection with the aim of disseminating these capabilities to empower the research community.
  • In our Clinical Research Units, infectious disease clinicians manage challenges in patient care first-hand, articulate the critical gaps and unmet needs in effective patient management, and spearhead efforts to align research with patient care.

Together, we at CISID take on ambitious questions in infectious disease research, motivated by real clinical problems, to broadly transform the diagnosis, treatment, and management of infection.

We are scientists, innovators, and clinicians coming together to tackle urgent challenges in infectious disease research to improve health for all.

Where We Are

CISID members are affiliated with research centers and hospitals located across the greater Boston area.