Adrian Woolfson is the co-founder, Executive Chairman, and President of Replay, a genomic medicine, genome writing, and cell therapy biotechnology company based in San Diego, California, which has the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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 Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, supervised by 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[1]Stage Immuno-Oncology/Hematology at Pfizer’s world headquarters in New York City; Chief Medical Officer of the venture-backed cancer neoantigen vaccine biotechnology company Nouscom based in Basel, Switzerland, and Rome; and most recently 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 150 scientific papers, book chapters, reviews, and patents, and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Science magazine. He also contributes to The London Review of Books, Prospect, 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, 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.

Website: adrianwoolfson.com

Photo (c) Myla Thomas