For Ed Doherty and his collaborators, the vaccine project has been a long haul.
“It’s going to kill me, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” joked Doherty, co-founder of Attivare Therapeutics, an anticancer startup born out of Harvard labs amidst the pandemic’s disruptive swirl.
Attivare’s technology essentially creates tiny “factories” in the body where immune cells learn to recognize tumor cells and attack them. The process has yielded promising results in cancer clinical trials and been extended to fight infectious diseases, including a COVID vaccine created while the team was still at Harvard but too late in the pandemic to be part of the global response.
And in December of 2025, the Natick, Massachusetts, company received a $6.6 million grant extension from the Gates Foundation to continue to develop a vaccine for malaria, one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.
The story of the evolution of the vaccine project illustrates the potential power of different teams — basic scientists, translational scientists, and clinical medical researchers — working collaboratively. It also highlights how the path to discovery is seldom a straight line.
