Ionita Ghiran

Ionita Ghiran, MD is Associate Professor of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Beth Israel Lahey Health and Harvard Medical School (https://connects.catalyst.harvard.edu/Profiles/display/Person/27055). Prof. Ghiran graduated from “Iuliu Hatieganu” Medical School in 1995, and then during his doctoral training moved to Boston, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Anne Nicholson Weller at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Since then, Prof. Ghiran’s investigations have focused on human red blood cell as active immune cells during normal and pathological conditions, and the crosstalk between RBC-derived extracellular vesicles (exosomes) and from various other tissues, especially bone marrow and brain, continue to be investigated by his group. The over-arching goal of his investigations is to use bio-engineered RBCs as extracellular vesicle-dependent vehicles for genome editing machinery and biologics, targeting tissues and organs during both, normal (pre-emptive targeting), and pathological conditions (corrective targeting). An additional area of interest is to understand the effect of circadian rhythm on mechanisms responsible for extracellular vesicle biogenesis and the active release of RNA-protein complexes into the extracellular space.