Robert Manguso

Robert Manguso is a principal investigator in the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Cancer Research, an associate member at the Broad Institute, and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School. The major focus of Manguso’s lab is to discover new ways to improve cancer immunotherapy. The Manguso lab uses a range of approaches including mouse models, functional genomics, cellular immunology, and single-cell profiling to understand how cancers evade the immune system. Manguso pioneered the use of in vivo genetic screens with CRISPR to identify new immunotherapy targets and resistance mechanisms. These approaches led to the identification of the tyrosine phosphatase PTPN2 as a critical regulator of immunotherapy sensitivity in tumor cells, and the dsRNA-editing enzyme ADAR1 as a checkpoint that regulates the sensing of self-dsRNA by tumor cells. These discoveries indicate that there may be many ways that cancers can be targeted by the immune system, and the Manguso lab is developing the tools to identify these mechanisms. These approaches will enable a new understanding of how the immune system interacts with cancerous tissue and how the interaction can be manipulated to destroy tumors.

At the Broad, Manguso co-directs the Tumor Immunotherapy Discovery Engine (TIDE) project within the Cancer Program. The TIDE project uses in vivo functional genomics to identify new therapeutic targets for combination with existing immunotherapies and to determine the mechanisms by which tumors evade immunotherapy.

Manguso joined the Broad Institute in 2017 after completing his doctoral studies in Nicholas Haining’s lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2011 for research in Lotte Pedersen’s lab at the University of Copenhagen, and he holds a B.A. from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

Contact Robert Manguso via email at rmanguso@broadinstitute.org.