Kole Roybal

Dr. Roybal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his doctorate in Immunology from UT Southwestern Medical Center and was a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Wendell A. Lim at UCSF and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

He is currently a member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and an inaugural Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. He is also the Deputy Director of the UCSF Center for Synthetic Immunology recently funded by the Cancer Moonshot Initiative. He was awarded the Sartorius and Science Magazine Prize for Regenerative Medicine and Cell Therapy and the NIH New Innovator Award in 2018.

The Roybal lab harnesses the tools of Synthetic Biology and Immunology to control and customize immune cell therapeutics for cancer and autoimmunity. His body of work was foundational to the next-generation immune cell therapy company, Cell Design Labs, where he was a founding scientist. Cell Design Labs was acquired by Gilead at the end of 2017. He was also instrumental in developing universal CAR T cell technology in collaboration with Xyphos Biosciences, which was acquired by Astellas at the end of 2019. He has now co-founded Arsenal Biosciences, which focuses on building cellular therapies for solid tumors with a combination of cutting-edge synthetic biology and gene editing technologies.