Michael O'Dwyer
Justin Edwards
Jonathan Gilbert
Jonathan Gilbert, PhD joined SQZ in 2013 and has been a key player in the growth and development of the company from its formative stages. As the Vice President of Exploratory Research, he is applying the Cell Squeeze Technology to generate new cell therapy concepts in multiple disease areas from cancer to regenerative medicine. In previous roles he lead Business Development as well as managing active partnerships such as the >$1B Collaboration with Roche. Dr. Gilbert received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT, where he was a Presidential Fellow, and studied biomedical applications of structured polyelectrolyte films with Professor Robert Cohen and Professor Michael Rubner. He has published over a dozen articles and is an inventor on 8 patents.
Geoff Hodge
Geoff is the CEO of SOTIO Biotech US, a Cambridge, MA based subsidiary of SOTIO Biotech a.s. that is focused on the development of novel cell therapies to treat solid tumor cancers. He has over 30 years of experience in the biotechnology industry, providing bioprocessing technical solutions for companies including GE Healthcare Life Sciences (Cytiva), Millennium Pharmaceuticals (Takeda), Genetics Institute (Wyeth/Pfizer) and Alpha-Beta Technology. He is an inventor on more than a dozen bioprocess equipment and technology patents.
Prior to SOTIO, Geoff was Chief Technical Officer at Unum Therapeutics, where he managed all technical operations for the company—including process and analytical development, manufacturing, and quality—for the company’s clinical phase viral vector and T-cell processes, as well as overseeing corporate IT, facilities, and logistics. He was previously a co-founder of Xcellerex, a company pioneering single-use bioreactors, mixers, facilities, and GMP manufacturing services, featuring single-use manufacturing and high-throughput process development services. He is the inventor of record on multiple core technology patents for Xcellerex, and served as an operations leader at GE Healthcare Life Sciences after GE acquired Xcellerex. Geoff holds an M.S. in Biotechnology from WPI and Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Colgate University.
David Barrett
Dr. Barrett first completed a Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering in 1997 before going on to complete his combined MD/PhD (Molecular Biology and Genetics) at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004. He moved to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for his residency in pediatrics, completed in 2007, and his fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology, which he finished in 2010. He was an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and an attending physician in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Division of Oncology, Transplant and Cellular Therapy Section until 2020. He is now Vice President of Translational Research at Tmunity Therapeutics.
Dr. Barrett is interested in the translational development of immune therapies for pediatric cancers. He participated in some of the preclinical development of the product that became Kymriah, and remembers well how much we learned from the first pediatric patient to be treated. He went on to work on the preclinical development of not only CARs for CD19 (mouse and humanized), but also CD22, GD2, GPC2, CD2, CD5, CD7, CD123, CD38 and even an anti-CAR CAR. In his lab at CHOP, he also focused on translational research from patient samples, focusing on features of the starting material for CAR manufacture that led to better clinical outcomes with Kymriah.
Ben Wang
Austin Bigley
Andrew Weinberg
In recent years we have been defining T cell populations within the blood and tumor of cancer patients to determine potential protein/pathways that could specifically target TIL therapeutically. Our initial publication compared T cells from patients with colorectal liver metastatses and ovarian cancer. We found several differences in the phenotype of CD8s, CD4s, and Tregs between the TIL and blood that were consistent between these two different types of tumors. This suggested to us that two distinct tumor types were behaving very similar immunologically, hence one could potentially target them with the same immunotherapy agents (e.g. PD-1 blockade works for several different tumor types). With this in mind we have found several new protein targets that we are exploring as therapeutic targets preclinically with this approach. Upon further inspection with other tumor types and a deeper dive into the CD8 phenotype in tumors vs blood we discovered a unique CD8 T cell population that express both CD39 and CD103. These T cells were only found in tumors and were highly enriched for tumor-reactivity. The CD39/103 double CD8 TIL had both an activated and exhausted phenotype, suggesting that they had recently encountered the tumor Ag in situ. Another unique finding was the highly clonal nature of these CD8 TIL when assessed directly ex vivo and these clones were found at very low frequency in the blood of cancer patients. The data suggested that these cells make it into the tumor microenvironment and expand when they encounter their tumor Ag; however, chronic activation in the tumor might lead to exhaustion of this CD8 TIL population. We have now been able to rescue/grow these cells in vitro and expand them from thousands of cells to billions in a 4-week span. We have found that they can kill autologous tumors in vitro and make autologous tumors completely regress in tumor-bearing mice. This data has set the stage for an adoptive T cell therapy clinical trial and will be performed with this tumor-reactive T cell population. Our group has had a pre-IND discussion with the FDA earlier this year and are currently performing 3 qualifying runs, which should be completed by Jan 2022. We intend to submit the IND for this clinical trial in early 2022 and commence with the trial soon thereafter.
