Andrea Van Elsas

He has previously served as Chief Scientific Officer at Aduro Biotech, following the acquisition of BioNovion, a company he co-founded in 2011, and held various positions at Organon (acquired by Schering-Plough and later by Merck) in The Netherlands and Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. While working for Organon and Schering-Plough, he directed the immuno-oncology portfolio and led the anti-PD1 program that later became known as pembrolizumab. As a postdoctoral researcher, he worked in the lab of 2018 Nobel Laureate Jim Allison at the University of California, Berkeley and is a co-inventor on the original anti-CTLA-4 patents that formed the basis for the development of ipilimumab, the first checkpoint inhibitor approved in 2011 by the FDA for the treatment of melanoma.