Robert M. Kotin

Dr. Robert Kotin has been a leader in adeno-associated virus (AAV) research for over 30 years, beginning as a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University Medical Center (now Weill), where he discovered a common integration site for AAV DNA in human chromosome 19, which he designated AAVS1 locus. He spent most of his career in the Intramural Research Program at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a tenure track investigator then as a tenured senior investigator and Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Gene Therapy.

While at the NIH, Dr. Kotin’s laboratory cloned and sequenced AAV4 and AAV5 and demonstrated that these serotypes may be “vectorized” ushering in the pursuit of novel capsids with different biological properties. Dr. Kotin invented and developed a scalable recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) production process in Sf9 cells which has been licensed by several companies, including uniQure, Voyager Therapeutics, and Biomarin, for clinical development. His laboratory’s research at the NIH resulted in the discovery of an AAV replication product that has been described as closed-ended linear duplex DNA that may serve as an alternative to plasmid DNA for non-viral gene therapy. In 2014 Dr. Kotin left the NIH to join Voyager Therapeutics, then in 2017 became scientific founder and vice president at Generation Bio.

Since leaving the NIH, Rob has maintained a funded research program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School where he is a Professor (adjunct) in the Gene Therapy Center. Rob earned his BA in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and his PhD from Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now Robert Wood Johnson Medical School) in microbiology.