Adrian Woolfson

Adrian Woolfson is Cofounder, President, and Executive Chairman of Replay, a VC-backed genome writing, gene editing, and genome engineering company based in La Jolla, California. He was formerly Executive Vice President and Head of Research and Development at Sangamo Therapeutics based in San Francisco, London, and France, where he led the first ever in vivo genome editing human study, the development of a novel CAR-Treg platform, led an allogeneic CAR-T cell collaboration with KITE/Gilead, transitioned the giroctocogene fitelparvovec hemophilia A gene therapy program into a registrational Ph3 (AFFINE Study) led by Pfizer, and played a key role in closing a ~$3B deal with Biogen and a ~$1B deal with Novartis. He was Chief Medical Officer at the 5AM, Abingworth, Versant, LSP-back cancer neoantigen company Nouscom, based in Basel Switzerland and Rome, where he led the development of the first personalized melanoma cancer neoantigen vaccine into a Ph1 study. Prior to that he was Global Clinical Leader of Early and Late Stage Immuno-Oncology/Hematology at Pfizer in New York, where he led the registrational Ph3 of Pfizer’s SMO inhibitor Daurismo and established a portfolio of I-O studies for Pfizer’s PD-L1 inhibitor Bavencio. He was Global Clinical Lead in Oncology at Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton, where amongst other things he led the development of a novel JAK2 inhibitor. His undergraduate medical training was at King’s College, UK, where he was awarded the Jelf Medal. His clinical medical training was completed at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK and his post-graduate medical training was at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, UK. He was the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College Cambridge and a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK where he worked with inventor of monoclonal antibodies and Nobel Prizewinner César Milstein. This led to the discovery of soluble CD1 antigens, a novel method for refolding immunoglobulin supergene family domains, the development of CD1d tetramers, and the demonstration that protein aggregation in Huntington’s disease is directly causal to the disease pathology. He has authored over 100 publications and the named inventor on several patents including the first ever I-O triplet therapy. He is a Founding Member and Executive Advisory Committee member of the GEN Biotechnology journal, the author of two critically acclaimed books Life Without Genes and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics, and a regular contributor to Science, Nature, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.