Endowed Chair in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
The Lieberman laboratory studies cytotoxic T lymphocytes and NK and their role in immune protection from infection and cancer, focusing on the molecular pathways used to kill both mammalian cells and microbes (bacteria and parasites). She was the first to describe CD8 T cell exhaustion in humans, which is the basis for current checkpoint blockade therapies for treating cancer. They also identified the mechanism behind inflammatory death (pyroptosis) triggered by innate immune recognition of pathogens and danger signals and the role of pyroptosis in infection and cancer. Recent work has identified important roles for pyroptosis in SARS-CoV-2, Yersinia, and Group A streptococcal infection.
Her laboratory has also been in the forefront of developing RNAi-based therapeutics and using RNAi for genome-wide screening. They were the first to show that siRNAs could be used to treat disease in vivo and to develop cell-targeted RNAs that knockdown gene expression in vivo in immune cells and cancer.
Dr. Lieberman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
