He has mentored numerous PhD and post-doctoral fellows, served on the editorial board of several journals, held visiting professorships at international universities and is member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Third World Academy of Sciences and the Argentinean Academy of Sciences. He is Senior Investigator of the National Research Council (CONICET) and Professor of Immunology at the School of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires. He currently heads the Division of Immunopathology at the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine (IBYME) and is Deputy Director of IBYME.
Gabriel Rabinovich's laboratory is interested in understanding the function of glycans and glycan-binding proteins in cellular processes relevant to immune regulation, tolerance and angiogenesis in health and disease. Together with his team, Rabinovich has demonstrated that galectin-dependent regulatory programs can blunt harmful immune responses by selectively depleting pathogenic T cells, triggering differentiation of tolerogenic dendritic cells and promoting polarization of macrophages and microglia toward an anti-inflammatory phenotype. They demonstrated that malignant cells can use the galectin-glycan pathway to create immunosuppressive networks that thwart antitumor responses. Notably, they found that galectin-glycan interactions can also preserve angiogenesis in tumors refractory to anti-angiogenic treatment by recapitulating the signaling activity of vascular endothelial growth factor. These findings open new possibilities for development of therapeutic strategies aimed at potentiating antitumor responses, limiting autoimmune inflammation and overcoming aberrant angiogenesis.