Ana Jaklenec
brings over 20 years of experience in the areas of bioengineering, materials science, and vaccine stabilization and delivery. She is a Principal Investigator at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. She has written over 45 articles in high-impact journals and has over 60 issued and pending patents worldwide. She received her Bachelor’s Degree from Boston University in 1998 and her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2007, both in Biomedical Engineering. Her postdoctoral training was with Institute Professor Robert Langer and Professor Daniel Anderson at MIT, where their research focused on drug delivery of biologics, among other projects. At MIT, she has secured and managed over 20 major competitive grants from government and private foundations, including The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, NIH, and the Norwegian Research Council. Additionally, she has supervised over 50 pre- and post-doctoral students, many of whom are currently faculty at universities in the US and abroad.
Her research at MIT is at the interface of engineering and immunology with a focus on global health. Her major focus is the study and development of polymers to deliver liable drugs, particularly vaccines, DNA vectors and mRNAs, in stable form for prolonged periods of time with unique kinetics. Their work is in progress in the following areas: developing single injection self-boosting vaccines; nanocarrier-based vaccine approaches targeting protective memory responses after parenteral immunization; 3D printed on-demand microneedle vaccines; developing on-patient medical records using invisible dyes; creating long-term drug delivery systems for cancer immunotherapy; developing heat stable and environmentally sustainable polymer-based carriers for oral delivery of micronutrients and probiotics. Her work on developing innovative and translatable technologies to help large populations in the developing world has been published in high-impact journals.
