Vicki Plaks
Stefanie Mandl
Samia Khan
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
