Arthur M. Krieg, MD has worked in the oligonucleotide field since the 1980s. Art graduated from Haverford College in 1979, received his MD from Washington University in 1983, and completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Minnesota in 1986. He was a Staff Fellow at the NIH in the Arthritis Institute from 1986 to 1991, when he joined the University of Iowa, becoming Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Rheumatology. He has had 19 years of patient care experience, although his focus has always been on basic research and teaching. Art discovered the immune stimulatory CpG DNA motif in 1994, which led to a new approach to immunotherapy and vaccine adjuvants. Based on this technology he co-founded Coley Pharmaceutical Group in 1997, discovering and taking 4 novel oligonucleotides into clinical development, including the anthrax vaccine adjuvant CpG 7909 in AV7909 (NuThrax®). Art was co-founder, CSO of Coley Pharmaceutical Group from 1997 until its acquisition and incorporation into Pfizer in 2008. He then served as CSO of Pfizer’s Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Unit from 2008 to 2011, becoming co-founder and CEO at RaNA Therapeutics from 2011 to 2013, and CSO at Sarepta until July 2014. In 2015 he founded Checkmate Pharmaceuticals to develop novel oligonucleotides for cancer immunotherapy, and then served as CSO until its acquisition by Regeneron in 2022. Art co-founded the first antisense journal, Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, which he edited for 16 years, and the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society, for which he recently served as President.
Art is currently an adjunct Professor in the UMass Chan Medical School RNA Therapeutics Institute and serves on the scientific advisory boards of several companies. He has published more than 250 scientific papers and is an inventor on >50 issued US patents covering oligonucleotide technologies.
Mark W. Frohlich, M.D. is a medical oncologist with deep drug development & translational research experience. Expertise in immuno-oncology & cell therapy. Experience with drug approvals in US & EU, and reimbursement & commercialization challenges.
Prof. Dane Wittrup attended the University of New Mexico as an undergraduate, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Bachlor’s in Chemical Engineering in June, 1984. Wittrup went on to attend the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he worked with Prof. James Bailey on flow cytometry and segregated modeling of recombinant populations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Biology in 1988, he spent a brief time working at Amgen before becoming an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September of 1999, where he is now the C.P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biological Engineering, in addition to working with the Koch Institute as the Associate Director for Engineering.
Prof. Weiss is one of the pioneers of synthetic biology. He has been engaged in synthetic biology research since 1996 when he was a graduate student at MIT and where he helped set up a wet-lab in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. After completion of his PhD, Weiss joined the faculty at Princeton University, and recently returned to MIT to take on a tenured faculty position in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Prof. Irvine holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering Physics from University of Pittsburgh. After completing his PhD at MIT in Polymer Science, he continued his postdoctoral research in Immunology at Stanford University. Darrell Irvine joined MIT in 2002 as Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Material Science and Engineering and the then Biological Engineering Division.
