Michael C. Milone

Dr. Milone is a Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for Verismo Therapeutics. He is currently an Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and founding member of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. He has over 25 years of experience in immunology and close to 20 years of experience in the development of genetically engineered T cell therapies for therapeutic applications. He is a co-inventor of CTL019, the first chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-based T cell therapy to reach regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe. He has also led or contributed to the development of several new CAR-T cell therapies for multiple myeloma, solid tumors and non-malignant disease such as the autoimmune disease, pemphigus vulgaris being developed by Cabaletta Bio, another company co-founded by Dr. Milone. He currently leads a team of translational researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania that are developing novel immunoreceptor and engineered T cell designs for effective T cell-based immunotherapy, including the KIR-based CAR design that forms a foundation for the approach being developed by Verismo Therapeutics. Dr. Milone has received several honors recognizing his research including the Clinical Research Forum’s Top Ten Clinical Research Achievement Award in 2017 for work on CAR T cell-based immunotherapy of multiple myeloma and an Agilent Thought Leader Award in 2020 with Carl June, MD recognizing their contributions to the field of CAR T-cell mediated cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Milone is a graduate of the accelerated BS-MD program between Stevens Institute of Technology and New Jersey Medical School. He holds a B.S. in Chemical Biology from the Stevens and received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in experimental pathology in 1999 from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now a part of Rutgers). He is a board-certified clinical pathologist, completing an internship in Internal Medicine, residency in Clinical Pathology and fellowship training in Clinical Pathology and Transfusion Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He continues to maintain a clinical practice as the Associate Director of the Toxicology Laboratory at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, receiving several awards for his excellence in teaching and research.