Axel Hoos

Dr. Axel Hoos has served as Chief Executive Officer of Scorpion Therapeutics since August 2021. He is a distinguished physician-scientist, entrepreneur, leader and biopharma executive. Prior to Scorpion, he served as Senior Vice President, R&D Governance Chair, and Therapeutic Area Head for Oncology at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (GSK), where he oversaw technical and funding decisions and re-built the Oncology business, after GSK’s 2015 divestment of oncology products to Novartis, across all therapeutic modalities in the focus areas of immuno-oncology, synthetic lethality, tumor cell targeting, epigenetics, and cell & gene therapy.

Dr. Hoos is recognized as an immuno-oncology pioneer for his work on the development of the anti-CTLA-4 antibody ipilimumab, the first FDA-approved checkpoint immunotherapy, and the creation of a new development paradigm for cancer immunotherapies, which helped launch the field of immuno-oncology.

He currently serves as a member of the Board of Trustees at the Sabin Vaccine Institute, a global health organization, Director on the Board of TCR2, a cell therapy company, and member of the Scientific Advisory Board and Co-Director of the Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium at the Cancer Research Institute. He co-founded and served as Director on the Board at Imugene, an Australian biotech company, from 2013-2021, and was a founding member of the PACT Initiative of the Biden Cancer Moonshot.

Dr. Hoos received his doctorate in Medicine from Ruprecht-Karls-University in Heidelberg, Germany, and his Ph.D. in molecular oncology from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). He trained in general surgery at the Technical University of Munich and as a fellow in cancer research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and is an alumnus of the Program for Leadership Development at Harvard Business School.