Ionita Ghiran, MD
About Dr. Ionita Ghiran
Ionita C. Ghiran, MD, is an Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School. He is an internationally acclaimed researcher who received his MD from the Hatieganu Medical and Pharmaceutical University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He did postdoctoral training at this institution in the Dept. of Cellular and Molecular Biology. Dr. Ghiran was then a Research Fellow in the Division of Allergy and Inflammation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Dr. Ghiran is a highly productive investigator in his area of expertise of innate immunity, cell biology and advanced imaging technology. He has made significant contributions to the field in two main areas: firstly, delineating novel roles for circulating red blood cells as innate immune cells during normal and pathological conditions such as sickle cell and sepsis; and secondly, inventing and developing magnetic levitation-based cell phone-centered technologies aimed at screening and diagnosis of red blood cell diseases in resource poor settings. Most recently, his research has focused on understanding the crosstalk between RBC-derived extracellular vesicles and various tissues, especially bone marrow and brain, and the role of RBCs and RBC-EV glycosylation/de-glycosylation during sepsis. His over-arching goal 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).