Toni Kline

Toni has been working with Engine since 2020 in drug discovery and chemistry. She has over 30 years of experience in drug discovery across academia, biotech, and big pharma. She has created and led successful teams toward discovery of preclinical and clinical candidates in several therapeutic areas, predominantly antibacterial and oncology. Toni remains active in advising the translational medicine community at Stanford and University of California San Francisco.

Prior to Engine, Toni formed the Chemistry team at Sutro Biopharma, where their novel payload-linker became the “DC” component of the antibody drug conjugate (ADC) STRO-002, which is currently in Phase I studies for ovarian cancer. While at Sutro, Toni submitted, and encouraged her team to submit, a number of invention disclosures describing new approaches to oncology, immune-oncology, and protein bioconjugation to enrich the IP portfolio of the company. Before joining Sutro, Toni created a small chemistry team at the University of Washington, primarily focused on novel antibiotics, virulence, and the bacterial-host ecology. Before her University of Washington appointment, she was Principal Scientist at Seattle Genetics during the seminal years of ADC discovery, and before that, she was Senior Scientist at PathoGenesis (later Chiron) where she led a chemistry team in the discovery of the first LpxC inhibitor active against the Gram-negative pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Her other previous discovery chemistry contributions were at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Biogen, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Toni received her PhD from the University of Alabama in Birmingham, followed by postdoctoral training at Oregon State University and SUNY Stony Brook. She is the author of 43 peer-reviewed publications and an inventor on 13 patents.