Planning, Partnering and Investing

David Lagares, PhD is a scientist-entrepreneur at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. A native of Madrid, Spain, he earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry and medical sciences at the Centre for Molecular Biology “Severo Ochoa” in 2012.

Dr. Lagares completed his postdoctoral training in biomedical research at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School studying molecular mechanisms associated with tissue injury, fibrosis and regeneration. Since 2014, he is a Principal Investigator at the Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases and the Division of Pulmonary Critical Care Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2016, he was appointed Director of the Matrix and Mechanobiology Program at the MGH Fibrosis Research Center, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical in 2018.

His research laboratory investigates cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate tissue repair, fibrosis and tumor microenvironment, with an emphasis on the biochemical and biomechanical drivers of fibroblast recruitment and activation. Seminal work from his laboratory include the identification of the ADAM10-sEphrin-B2 pathway in lung injury and fibrosis (Lagares, D Nature Medicine) and the use of BH3 mimetic drugs to induce myofibroblast apoptosis and reversion of established fibrosis in the autoimmune fibrotic disease of scleroderma (Lagares, D Science Translational Medicine). Recently, his laboratory has identified durotaxis (stiffness-directed migration) as a major mechanism promoting cancer metastasis in fibrotic tumors. He is a recipient of multiple career awards from the National Institutes of Health and the American Thoracic Society. He is also a Co-Founder of Mediar Therapeutics and Zenon Biotech, biotech companies developing innovative anti-fibrotic therapies.