BioScience Forum Seminar: The Patient Knows Best: Next-Generation Oncology Immunotherapeutics from Patient Immune Responses

Date: December 12, 2018 @ 6:00 pm – @ 9:00 pm
Location: The Holiday Inn 275 S Airport Blvd, South San Francisco, California 94080, USA

BioScience Forum Presents

Tito Serafini, Ph.D.
Chief Strategy Officer and Founder
Atreca


"The Patient Knows Best: Next-Generation Oncology
Immunotherapeutics from Patient Immune Responses"

Abstract
We have recently seen dramatic improvement in patient outcomes from cancer therapies that engage a patient’s own immune response to destroy tumor tissue. Response rates in some indications have risen from single digit percentages to over 50%, with complete responses frequently observed. This may represent just the tip of the iceberg, and novel therapeutics and therapeutic modalities are necessary to continue making progress. A vigorous academic and industry-wide effort is underway in an attempt to turn metastatic cancer into a treatable disease.

Atreca is a privately held company developing novel therapeutics based on a deep understanding of the human immune response. Atreca’s unique discovery platform enables an industrialized identification of functional antibodies generated in the active immune responses of cancer patients responding to therapy. Analyses of such antibodies have led to the identification of over 1,300 patient antibodies that target non-autologous tumor selectively across multiple tumor types. This library of tumor-targeting antibodies is being used to develop therapeutics designed to treat large patient groups. Atreca’s first program to emerge from its platform, ATRC-101, is anticipated to enter clinical development in 2019, and has the potential to treat patients across a wide range of indications via a novel mechanism of action.

Biography
Dr. Serafini is one of the three principal founders of Atreca and was CEO from the Company’s inception in 2010 until 2018. In his role as Chief Strategy Officer, Dr. Serafini is responsible directly for research, preclinical development, technology, and intellectual property. He is a member of Atreca’s Board of Directors.

Before co-founding Atreca, he was Chief Scientific Officer of Nuon Therapeutics, a development-stage biotechnology company. Previously, Dr. Serafini was a founder of Renovis, a public biotechnology company, where he served as an executive officer in multiple technical and business management roles, including leading the research and M&A functions.

Prior to founding Renovis, Dr. Serafini was an award-winning faculty member in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he established the university’s Functional Genomics Laboratory.

Dr. Serafini received a B.S. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University (advised by Dr. James Rothman), and he performed postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco in the laboratory of Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
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