Prof. Jeffrey A. Gelfand

Dr. Gelfand is a Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Professor of Medicine, Part Time at Harvard Medical School. From 1994 to 1998, he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Medicine of Tufts University School of Medicine. He has conducted laboratory and clinical research in immunology, inflammation and infection for over 40 years. He developed the therapy and led the clinical trial, for treating hereditary angioedema with danazol, also first using that drug in autoimmune thrombocytopenia.Most recently,his research interests have focused on vaccines for infectious diseases and immunotherapeutics, as well as light-based therapeutics. At MGH he developed a monoclonal antibody/vaccine fusion targeting ovarian cancer, and a “self-assembling vaccine” platform to enable rapid vaccine creation for emerging infectious diseases, funded by DARPA, and is now the basis for ongoing vaccines. He holds 7 patents for such therapies. He initiated the first laboratory investigations on the laser adjuvant. This in turn led him to explore other light -based therapies, including photodynamic therapy of bacterial infections. In addition, he invented two heat shock protein- based vaccine platforms, currently being investigated for both cancer immunotherapy and Infectious Diseases vaccination. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “for distinguished contributions to clinical immunology and vaccine development’’.