Adrian Woolfson is the Co-Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Genyro, a synthetic genome design and construction company based in San Diego, California.

He was born in London and studied medicine at Balliol College, Oxford, and completed his doctoral and post-doctoral work on natural and artificial forms of human CD1 genes and protein folding at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, with Nobel Prize winner César Milstein. He was the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College Cambridge, and a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow. He was Global Medical Lead for Oncology at Bristol Myers Squibb, based in Princeton, New Jersey; Global Clinical Lead for Early- and Late-stage Immuno-Oncology/Hematology at Pfizer’s world headquarters in New York City; Chief Medical Officer of the venture-backed personalised cancer neoantigen vaccine biotechnology company Nouscom based in Basel, Switzerland, and Rome; and Executive Vice President and Head of Research and Development at Sangamo Therapeutics in California’s Bay Area, where he led several gene therapy, gene editing, cell therapy, transcriptional regulation, and genome engineering programs, including the first-ever study to edit the genome of a living person.

He is the author of the critically acclaimed Life Without Genes: The History and Future of Genomes (HarperCollins/Flamingo, 2000) and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics (Duckworth 2006), has authored over 160 scientific papers, book chapters, reviews, and patents, and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Science magazine. He also contributes to The London Review of Books, Prospect, The Washington Post, The Literary Review, The Spectator, Nature, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement, The Evening Standard, Daedalus, and The Financial Times, and is the Books Review Editor of the GEN Biotechnology journal. He previously lived in London, Cambridge, Oxford, and New York, and is currently based in San Francisco. His next book, On The Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence, on the science of genome writing – the ability to synthesize the entire genomes of humans and other species from scratch – will be published by Bloomsbury in February 2026.

Website: adrianwoolfson.com