MIT, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

Brandon DeKosky is an assistant professor at MIT, jointly between the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.
Brandon received a BS in chemical engineering from University of Kansas and a Hertz-supported PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center near Washington, D.C., where he worked on new ways to improve and analyze vaccine responses with a focus on major public health threats including HIV-1 and RSV. Brandon launched his independent academic career in 2017 at the University of Kansas in a joint position with the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and as a member of the Bioengineering graduate program. In 2021, Brandon began as an Assistant Professor in a joint faculty appointment with MIT Chemical Engineering and The Ragon Institute.
Brandon’s research focuses on developing and applying a suite of new high-throughput experimental and computational platforms for molecular analysis of adaptive immune responses. These efforts have been applied to better understand immune responses in the context of viral infections, autoimmunity, and cancer. His research has advanced repertoire-scale single immune cell analysis, protein engineering, and functional T cell analysis, including several discoveries that are being pursued for commercial drug development.
Brandon has been awarded several honors for his research program. His Ph.D. was supported by a Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship, an NSF Graduate Fellowship, and a Donald. D. Harrington Graduate Fellowship. In 2016, Brandon was awarded a K99 Pathway to Independence Award and an NIH Early Independence Award. He has also received the Department of Defense Career Development Award, the Biomedical Engineering Society Rising Star Award, and the AIChE Young Faculty Futures award.
Brandon has a strong interest in mentoring undergraduate and graduate students and promoting diversity. He has served as a faculty advisor at the Institute for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) and the Post-Baccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP) program at KU, and at the MIT Summer Research Program to help undergraduate researchers prepare for careers in biomedical research and Ph.D. graduate programs.

The central role of FcRn in regulating immunoglobulin G (IgG) persistence and transport provides opportunities for targeting this receptor in multiple different diagnostic and therapeutic situations. The engineering of IgGs with higher affinity for FcRn can be used to produce antibodies with longer in vivo half-lives, but only if the low affinity of the IgG-FcRninteraction at near neutral pH is retained. Conversely, an engineered IgG or Fc fragmentwith increased affinity for FcRn at both acidic and near neutral pH acts as a potent inhibitor of FcRn. Consequently, such an antibody (‘Abdeg’, for antibody that enhancesIgG degradation) can lower the levels of endogenous IgG and has led to the FcRn antagonist, efgartigimod, that has been developed by argenx and recently approved for the treatment of myasthenia gravis. Our recent work has also resulted in the generation of engineered Fc-fusions that selectively clear antigen-specific antibodies (‘Seldegs’, for selective degradation). Developments related to the modulation of the dynamic behavior of IgG in the bodywill be presented.