Steven Dowdy

Dr. Steven F. Dowdy is a Professor of Cellular & Molecular Medicine at the UCSD School of Medicine and a cancer biologist, specializing in the development and delivery of RNA therapeutics as well as in G1 cell cycle control in cancer. The Dowdy lab is focused on the molecular details of delivery of RNA therapeutics across the endosomal lipid bilayer as well as the synthesis of endosomal escape domains to overcome this rate-limiting and billion-year-old delivery challenge; its members were the first to synthesize bioreversible, charge neutralizing phosphotriester backbone RNAi prodrug triggers that increase metabolic stability, that augment pharmacokinetics and that enhance endosomal escape. Dr. Dowdy currently serves on five Science Advisory Boards for biotech companies and is an elected member of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society (OTS) Board of Directors. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular genetics from UC Irvine, working with Prof. Eric Stanbridge on tumor suppressor genes, and performed his postdoctoral fellowship studies at the Whitehead Institute, MIT, working with Prof. Bob Weinberg on the biochemistry of the Rb tumor suppressor gene.