Adrian Woolfson
Founder

Adrian Woolfson is a Co-founder of Replay. He was previously Executive Vice President and Head of R&D at Sangamo Therapeutics, leading programs in gene editing, the first in-human in vivo genome engineering studies (MPS-I, MPS-II, and Hemophilia B), transcriptional repression (Tauopathies, Prion, Huntington’s, Synuclein, Rett, ALS, Fragile X and c9orf-linked ALS), gene therapy (Hemophilia A, Fabry disease, PKU, A1AT, Glut1, and GSD1a), the first in-human autologous CAR-Treg study (solid organ transplant), and allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy (lymphoma). Prior to that he was Chief Medical Officer of the 5AM-, LSP-, Abingworth- and Versant-backed cancer neoantigen vaccine company Nouscom, based in Basel, Switzerland and Rome, Italy, where he managed the transition of their lead melanoma neoantigen vaccine asset to IND. He was Global Clinical Leader of Early and Late Stage Immuno-Oncology/Hematology at Pfizer in New York, managing an I-O portfolio encompassing a broad range of immuno-modulatory assets tested in monotherapy and combination, including a PD-L1 antagonist (Bavencio), 4-1BB (CD137) agonist, (utomilumab), OX40 agonist and CAR-Ts, and built the Pfizer I-O hematological malignancies portfolio. Prior to that led the Ph3 registrational study for Pfizer’s Hedgehog pathway (SMO) inhibitor Daurismo, which received FDA approval in June 2020. Before this he held positions of increasing responsibility at Bristol-Myers Squibb in London UK, and Princeton New Jersey, where he was part of the team that successfully launched the Bcr-Abl inhibitor Sprycel. His graduate and post-graduate medical training was in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, UK. His PhD thesis and post-doctoral work on molecular immunology was supervised by Nobel Prize winner, inventor of monoclonal antibodies, and discoverer of CD antigens, César Milstein. He was the Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College Cambridge, UK, a Welcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow, and a National Foundation for Cancer Research Fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, where he worked on alternative splicing and protein folding. He is the author of over 140 publications, including two critically acclaimed books, book chapters, reviews, and peer-reviewed scientific papers. He is an author on multiple patents addressing the assembly of synthetic DNA, immune silencing, synthetic protein refolding machinery, and the barcoding of human diseases using machine learning and soluble proteins. He is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Science magazine, and contributes to a range of other publications including: Nature, The Spectator, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Literary Review. He is on the Board of Directors of the Singapore and San Diego-based TCR drug discovery company ImmunoScape, and is a co-founder, Editorial Board member, and Books Review Editor of the GEN Biotechnology journal.