Alumni

Shion is currently a scientist in the Department of Antibody Engineering at Genentech. She is excited about creatively applying protein and antibody engineering techniques to design biotherapeutics against challenging targets and proteoforms. She is also interested in understanding and leveraging antibody biophysical properties and exploring how computational tools can expand the scope of drug discovery. Shion is looking forward to growing her career and pushing these research areas forward in an invigorating and collaborative place like Genentech.

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I am currently engineering antibody therapeutics with the help of display technologies.

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Zach is cofounder and CSO of Soteria Biotherapeutics, a biotech start-up spun out of the Wells lab in 2018. Soteria is leveraging AbCID technology to development next-generation bispecifics antibodies for the treatment of cancer.

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Using proteomics, automation, and machine learning, our work focuses on enabling confident early cancer detection

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Using functional proteomics approaches (including subtiligase!), our lab focus on characterizing how proteases and their substrates play critical roles in cell death and cell differentiation, viral infections, cardiovascular diseases and neurodegeneration.

I am interested in using protein engineering to develop next generation therapeutics. At Denali, I developed and optimized multiple platform technologies to transport therapeutic antibodies, enzymes, proteins, and oligonucleotides across the Blood-Brain Barrier for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. At Soteria, I am helping to develop the next generation of conditionally active bispecific T-cell engagers to treat cancer patients with solid tumors.

I'm using fruit flies to map behavior to neural circuits. I'm specifically interested in how the brain can keep track of intervals of time.

We are working on GPCRs now using A-GPS.

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I am currently directing Reflexion’s protein engineering efforts to create an exciting new class of therapeutics composed entirely of D-amino acids. Our mirror-image proteins are 30X smaller than traditional antibody therapeutics, enabling better tissue and tumor penetration, while being completely non-immunogenic and resistant to degradation by proteases. We are close to submitting our first IND with the FDA for our lead VEGF program, and have several immuno-oncology programs in late stages of development as well

After graduating UCSF, I joined Prescient Healthcare Group to work as a healthcare consultant working with biotech and pharma companies to help them define their product strategy and assess their competitive market.

Protein and antibody engineering of biotherapeutic molecules.

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My group is designing new immunotherapies and check point blockers.

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After leaving Jim's lab, I was a postdoc studying neurodegenerative disease with the late Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute. I was then recruited as the sixth employee at the drug discovery startup Jnana Therapeutics, where we focus on small molecule therapeutics targeting the SLC family of metabolite transporters. I currently co-lead the technology development group (chemical biology and high-throughput screening) as well as the immunology discovery group.

Since leaving UCSF I pursued an industrial post-doc at NIBR in Emeryville developing novel tools and assays to interrogate sub-cellular compound exposure in Gram-negative bacteria. From there I moved to a medicinal chemistry position at Exelixis before transitioning to my current role at BioMarin where I am exploring and developing new methods for delivering drug payloads to target tissues.

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At USAID Jason has worked in a variety of positions with a focusing on building the capacity of local development actors to realize their own development goals. In the U.S. Global Development lab he managed a portfolio of 50+ small research grants across Africa and Central Asia and developed programs to build clinical research and medical training capacity in post-Ebola Liberia. In the Bureau for Global Health he support the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) supporting the capacity development for local clinical care providers and host country governments in East and Southern Africa

Currently, my research interests are in two areas:

1. Develop new proximity labeling tools for protein-protein interaction study.
2. Role of protein posttranslational modification is peroxisome homeostasis.

After my Postdoc in the Wells Lab I joined the Biologics group at Gilead where I helped establish fundamental protein and antibody engineering capabilities. During my time at Gilead I have had the opportunity to lead or support multiple research and development programs from inception to IND, and I have also participated in external diligence efforts leading to the successful in-licensing of clinical stage therapeutics. I now lead a functional area that utilizes single B-cell cloning, multiple display technologies and structure-based design to discover and optimize fit-for-purpose protein therapeutics that address unmet needs across multiple therapeutic areas.

After finishing my post-doc with Jim, in 2014 I became a faculty member in the Department of Laboratory Medicine at UCSF, where 25% of my time is devoted to clinical work in molecular pathology and the remainder to running my research group. Our research lab is interested in using proteomic methods and cellular engineering to develop new therapies to treat poor-prognosis and drug-resistant forms of blood cancers

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Julie was a post-doctoral fellow with John Kuriyan and then joined Genentech in Protein Sciences. She left Genentech to become a Senior Research Investigator in the Protein Sciences group at BMS.

After graduating from the Wells lab I did a postdoc with Joe DeRisi where I began to focus on technology development for infectious disease diagnostics. After that I spent 4 years leading a team at the CZ Biohub, including building and running the Biohub's COVID19 PCR testing facility in 2020. I'm now working as a Scientific Advisor for early-stage startups at The Production Board.

Scientist at Ajinomoto. Proteomics, protein characterization, mass spectrometry. (Ajinomoto is doing the business for Biopharma companies to provide protein manufacturing or modifications, like ADCs.)

After an ~2 year stint at Carmot Therapeutics, contributing to the development of the small molecule lead-finding technology Chemotype Evolution, Jack joined the Protein Chemistry department at Genentech in 2013 where he is currently a Senior Scientist. The scientific focus of Jack's lab at Genentech has been the invention of bioconjugation chemistries and methods for application in drug delivery with a focus on antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs).

I'm still at RevMed (5 years!). It's been a crazy ride, and lots of programs are starting to really take off. Our SHP2 inhibitor continues to show promise after completing Phase 1 this year, and our mTORC1 inhibitor (based on Kevan's RapaLink1 technology) will be entering the clinic shortly. I'm also putting finishing touches on revisions for a Nature Chem Bio manuscript on the mTORC1 program over the break, and hopefully that will be in print early next year. And the Warp Drive technology continues to exceed all expectations. There'll be some updates announced at JPM in a couple of weeks, but we showed data last fall for an orally bioavailable KRAS G12D inhibitor that absolutely crushes xenograft tumors in mice. I've built and been leading a biochemistry and chemical biology group with some really fantastic scientists. My counterpart who heads cell and systems biology is transferring internally to another position at the start of the year, so I'll be leading the whole in vitro biology team soon, which is bigger than the company was when I started. It's amazing to see the organization grow and evolve like this.

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Fellowship program director, Division of Hematology/Oncology. Since leaving the Wells lab, I finished medical training and stayed close to home at UCSF and the San Francisco VA where I practice hematology/oncology and serve as program director for the fellowship program. In the latter role, I hope to provide opportunities to train the future Jim Wells' of the world.

After his postdoc, Sami joined the Oncology Biomarker Development group at Genentech, developing and implementing pharmacodynamic, predictive, and companion diagnostic biomarker strategies for selected clinical programs in the Genentech/Roche pipeline. More recently, Sami has been with the Real World Data Oncology group at Genentech, leveraging data from real-world healthcare settings, such as those from Flatiron Health, for insights and evidence supporting the Genentech/Roche oncology portfolio.

Dennis Wolan just accepted a position as X at Genentech. He was an Assistant Professor of Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps from 2009-2020 studying hydrolases, particularly proteases, in the human microbiome using proteomics and functional genomic. He developed new classes of protease inhibitors and substrate technologies.

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After leaving the Wells lab in 2009, I spent the next 10 years in Honolulu, HI in full time clinical practice as a hematologist and medical oncologist. In 2019, I returned to the Bay Area where I now practice at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Mountain View and Sunnyvale.

Prior to JNJ, Justin was Director of Biologics and Protein Engineering at Boeringer Ingleheim. After leaving the Wells lab 2006 he joined the Protein Sciences Group at Genentech ultimately rising to Senior Scientist and among other achievements developed new approaches to expression of bi-specific antibodies.

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I have been a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at Umass Amherst since leaving Jim’s lab at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals in 2005. My lab focuses on understanding structure and regulation of biomedical important proteases, like caspases and viral proteases. In particular we are interested in exploiting allosteric sites and exosites therapeutically. I also serve as the Director of the UMass Biotech Training Program.

Stating in 2020, I’ve been working on a new startup company focusing on developing drugs for Parkinson’s and other CNS diseases. I’ve recruited David O’Reilly as a founder (as you might recall, he was President of Catalyst early on and we’ve stayed friends); the other founder is Jim Surmeier, chair of the Dept. of Physiology at Northwestern. The company is based on Jim’s work focusing on a calcium channel whose activity is central to a number of CNS disorders, and we have a license to IP on the target and compounds from Northwestern. We’ve been working hard to shore up the IP and development plan, and will be hitting the (virtual) road to talk to investors next month.

Dr. Thanos has over 26 years of R&D experience, including 20 years in the biotechnology industry. Previously, Dr. Thanos was appointed Head of Biotherapeutics Discovery Research at Halozyme (NASDAQ: HALO), leading Molecular Biology / Protein Engineering, Immunology, and Cell Biology Groups at the company toward FDA approval of HYQVIA®, the ENHANZE® subcutaneous therapeutic delivery platform. Before HALO, Dr. Thanos was Head of Protein Engineering at Sutro Biopharma (NASDAQ:STRO). Prior to Sutro, Dr. Thanos co-founded Catalyst Biosciences (NASDAQ:CBIO), where he participated in raising venture capital, and helped to establish the company’s therapeutic technology platform. Earlier in his career, Dr. Thanos was a National Cancer Institute Postdoctoral Fellow under Professor Jim Wells at UCSF and Sunesis (NASDAQ:SNSS). He earned a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from UCLA where he was an NIH Chemistry / Biology Interface Predoctoral Fellow with Jim Bowie.

She has more than 15 years of experience in oncology therapeutics in biotechnology and large pharmaceutical companies. Liz was Assistant Director of Advanced Preclinical Pharmacology at OSI Pharmaceuticals, where she led discovery and translational research to advance a series of oncology programs to clinical development. Liz earned a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from New York University/Mount Sinai School of Medicine and completed postdoctoral work with Jim Wells at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals. She received her undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of New Hampshire.

I was a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellow in Jim’s lab from 1997-1998 at Genentech and Sunesis. I was a scientist at Sunesis and worked with an amazing team to develop small-molecule inhibitors of protein-protein interactions using fragment-based drug discovery. After nine years in drug discovery and development at Sunesis, I moved to UCSF to help Jim and Adam Renslo lead the Small Molecule Discovery Center. I am also a Professor and the department Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, where I run a research group dedicated to chemical biology and drug discovery for new and challenging targets. Michelle was a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellow in Jim’s lab from 1997-1998 at Genentech and Sunesis. She then spent nine years at Sunesis, first in discovery of protein-protein interaction inhibitors and then as Associate Director of Cell Biology. In 2007, she moved to UCSF to join the Small Molecule Discovery Center and direct run a research group dedicated to chemical biology and drug discovery for new and challenging targets. She recently became Chair of the department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

Dan moved from Genentech to Sunesis Pharmaceuticals when Jim founded the company in 1998, and he has been pursuing fragment-based drug discovery ever since. After Sunesis Dan co-founded Carmot Therapeutics, and has since moved to Frontier Medicines.

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Greg’s lab applies diverse techniques from biophysics, protein engineering, and chemical biology to dissect protein function. He has co-founded two biotech companies and has graduated >100 students and postdoctoral fellows from his lab.

Dr. Sachdev Sidhu is an expert in phage display technology and structure-based and combinatorial protein engineering. In 2008, after spending a decade as a principal investigator in the Department of Protein Engineering at Genentech, Inc., Dr. Sidhu joined the University of Toronto to start his academic lab. At Genentech, Dr. Sidhu led the development of phage-displayed synthetic antibody libraries that have since proven to be a rich source of valuable reagents for basic research and potential therapeutics. In addition to antibody engineering, Dr. Sidhu has extensive experience with phage display of other diverse polypeptides, including peptides, peptide-binding domains, hormones and antibody mimics.

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We are developing medicine for unmet medical needs. We discover drug targets using the large genetic information available to us.

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Shanes primary job is the discovery and engineering of antibody therapeutics for autoimmune diseases. He is also active in developing new technologies related to e g. bispecifics, anti body drug conjugates and anti body crystallization.

Working as a postdoc in the Wells lab was a highlight of my early career and a key influence in directing me toward a career of discovering and developing protein-based therapeutics. Two decades, two continents and two US coasts later, I’m back in the vicinity of where this began and currently lead the biotherapeutics discovery team at Gilead Sciences.

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Prior to Xilio, he was President of R&D and Chief Scientific Officer at ARIAD Pharmaceuticals. Earlier in his career, Dr. Clackson was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. James A. Wells in the Department of Protein Engineering at Genentech, where his studies on growth hormone receptor defined the now-established “hot spot” paradigm for how proteins interact. He received his PhD in Biology from Cambridge University for research conducted under Dr. Greg Winter at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology into antibody engineering and the development of antibody phage display technology.

I spent several years as a drug discovery biochemist at Chiron and Sunesis, and at Exelixis I made a major career shift by moving into oncology drug clinical science. I'm now a Director of Clinical Science at Genentech where I've been working on cancer immunotherapy trials in melanoma and lung cancer since 2012.

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After leaving Jim’s lab at Genentech, I worked at Roche using molecular and genomic approaches to identify new targets for neurobiology. I then moved onto KaloBios to develop several antibodies and helped the company go public. Currently, I am at Nektar engineering cytokines for oncology and autoimmune diseases.

After leaving Jim's lab in protein engineering, I accepted a scientist position in the medicinal chemistry department where I worked on numerous small molecule and biologics programs. I also led the ADC discovery team from 2003-2006. I left Genentech in 2007 to work as a full time dad, and resumed my career 4 years later as the head of chemistry at Igenica in Burlingame. In 2016 I was recruited by Bolt Biotherapeutics to lead their ADC discovery effort. I was the 3rd employee and helped build the company from the ground up. I left Bolt in 2019 and have been consulting ever since.

Henry is currently consulting full-time on biologics R&D. After 3 exciting years as a postdoc in the Wells Lab at Genentech, he continued work in therapeutic antibody engineering, including discovery and early development, and moved to management roles at Genentech, CytomX, and Triphase

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Paul Carter is currently a Genentech Fellow in the Antibody Engineering Department at Genentech and President of the Antibody Society. Paul's research passion is the quest for breakthrough antibody-based therapeutics that transform the lives of patients. Current research projects include making previously intractable targets druggable with antibodies, intracellular delivery of proteins and preclinical immunogenicity risk prediction for engineered protein therapeutics.

I’ve been in the pharma industry during all of the 30 years since my postdoc. The upside has been the opportunity to work with many different types of projects spanning from protein engineering to pharmaceutical development of antibodies, small molecules and radio conjugates, involving projects from exploratory phase to phase III clinical studies. This has involved collaborations with experts in many disciplines and many great scientists. The downside has been to have to leave an interesting field, but on the other hand it’s been stimulating to dig into new fields with an ‘outside’ view.

Since working with Jim at Genentech in the 1980’s, I returned to school for my PhD (University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey), did a postdoc with Jim Marks at UCSF and have been knocking around the biotech/pharma industry ever since (Eos Biotechnology, Protein Design Labs, Facet Biotech, Abbott/Abbvie). Currently a Research Fellow at Abbvie, leading up our West Coast Biologics group in Redwood City in charge of antibody discovery (phage and hybridoma), antibody engineering, and research-scale protein production.