Tom Wickham is Chief Scientific Officer for GentiBio. Tom brings over 25 years of experience in championing diverse drug platforms including cellular, gene, immuno-biologic, and liposomal therapies from Discovery through Registration-directed clinical trials. Tom recently joined GentiBio from Rubius Therapeutics where he was Senior Vice President of Research and Development. At Rubius, Tom pioneered synthetic biology approaches using genetically engineered red cells for autoimmunity, immuno-oncology, and rare disease applications and built a full Discovery and Preclinical organization leading to multiple product programs and two IND filings. Prior to Rubius, he served as Vice President of R&D at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals where he led preclinical through a Phase 2 registrational trial of a targeted liposomal therapy in breast cancer. Prior to Merrimack, Tom was Senior Director of Preclinical Pharmacology and led efforts at EMD Lexigen (now Merck-Serono) to advance immuno-oncology drugs through preclinical development and into Phase I trials. At GenVec, Inc., he led the advancement of a targeted gene delivery platform for oncology, cardiovascular, infectious disease and genetic disease applications. Tom holds a B.S. in chemical/biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from Cornell University, and pursued his postdoctoral training at the Scripps Research Institute in the Department of Immunology.
Team Category: Management
Andy is Co-founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer of GentiBio. Prior to joining GentiBio, Dr. Walker was Chief Executive Officer of Jewel Biotherapeutics and formerly Senior Vice President of Technical Operations at Juno Therapeutics, as well as serving in multiple senior leadership roles at AGC Biologics. He is an experienced senior leader overseeing Process Development and GMP manufacturing of cellular therapeutics and protein biologics. Dr. Walker received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington and his Ph.D. in Chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. In his free time, Andy is an avid fly fisherman, loves all things about the University of Washington (Go Dawgs!), and prefers to spend as much time as possible on a boat or in the mountains. He also thinks he is funny, but his coworkers tend to disagree.
Chandra is Co-founder and Vice President of Research and Development Operations for GentiBio. Prior to joining GentiBio, Chandra was the Director of Project Management at Casebia Therapeutics focused on the Autoimmune Disease portfolio and supporting HSC and in vivo liver-directed gene editing approaches. Previously, he spent over a decade as a scientist in various research and leadership roles of increasing responsibility at Bayer HealthCare, starting in enzymology and protein engineering and transitioning to non-malignant hematology lab head and research project team lead for multiple projects from discovery to IND stage. He started his career in industry working on next-generation PCR and sequencing technologies at Applied Biosystems. Chandra received his B.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Kentucky.