Andrew Khalil awarded grant to better understand and treat inflammatory diseases

June 8, 2026 — Assistant Professor Andrew Khalil of the Department of Biomedical Engineering has been awarded a prestigious Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA; R35 grant) from the National Institutes of Health. 

Funds from the five-year award will support Prof. Khalil’s efforts to better understand how immune cells regulate inflammation, tissue repair, metabolism, and disease progression across a broad range of conditions, including obesity, diabetes, fibrosis, cancer, and aging. 

“Many chronic diseases are driven by persistent inflammatory states that emerge from interactions between immune cells and tissues,” says Khalil. “Our goal is to engineer human systems that allow us to study and control these processes in ways that are difficult or impossible with existing models in order to ultimately redirect these immune interactions toward therapeutic outcomes.”

Engineering stem cell immunotherapies

To create these advanced systems that recreate human immune-tissue interactions in the laboratory, Prof. Khalil’s lab will be combining human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) technologies with tissue and genetic engineering approaches. In parallel, they will explore the therapeutic potential of adoptive transfer of engineered stem-cell-derived macrophages as regenerative immunotherapies. 

These studies will investigate how stem cell-derived immune cells engraft into tissues, maintain reparative functions, and potentially restore tissue homeostasis in chronic inflammatory conditions and aging. 

Modeling diseases at scale

Beyond its translational implications, the work seeks to establish broadly accessible human-relevant experimental platforms for immunology and disease modeling. 

By integrating CRISPR-based screening and synthetic gene-regulation technologies, the team aims to identify fundamental mechanisms of immunoregulation and to uncover new therapeutic targets for inflammatory diseases. 

The project includes efforts to improve the scalability and cryopreservation of key stem-cell-derived progenitors to expand the technology's dissemination to the broader biomedical research community.