Arie Belldegrun

Dr. Belldegrun is the Chairman of UroGen Pharma and has served as our Chair since December 2012. He has built a distinguished career as a visionary surgeon, scientist, and life sciences entrepreneur.

Dr. Belldegrun founded Kite Pharma, a biopharmaceutical company engaged in the development of innovative cancer immunotherapies, where he served as Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer until the acquisition of Kite by Gilead Sciences in October 2017.

Dr. Belldegrun has had a distinguished tenure in the life sciences and has been closely involved with the founding and advancement of several successful biopharmaceutical companies, including Cougar Biotechnology and Agensys. Abiraterone, developed by Cougar, is a mainstay of therapy for patients with metastatic prostate cancer.

Dr. Belldegrun most recently co-founded Allogene Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company pioneering the development of allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T) therapies for cancer. He serves as Executive Chairman of Allogene; Chairman of Two River Group and Kronos Bio; Co-Founder and Senior Managing Director of Vida Ventures, a life science venture group.

Dr. Belldegrun is a Professor of Urology, holds the Roy and Carol Doumani Chair in Urologic Oncology, and is Director of the UCLA Institute of Urologic Oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Prior to joining UCLA, Dr. Belldegrun served as a research fellow in surgical oncology and immunotherapy under Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg at the National Cancer Institute/NIH. He completed his M.D. at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, Israel, his post-graduate studies in immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and his residency in urologic surgery at Harvard Medical School. He has authored several books on oncology and more than 500 scientific and medical papers related to urological cancers, immunotherapy, gene therapy, and cancer vaccines. Dr. Belldegrun is certified by the American Board of Urology and is a fellow of the American Association of Genitourinary Surgeons.