Dr. Porteus was raised in California and was a local graduate of Gunn High School before completing A.B. degree in “History and Science” at Harvard University where he graduated Magna Cum Laude and wrote an thesis entitled “Safe or Dangerous Chimeras: The recombinant DNA controversy as a conflict between differing socially constructed interpretations of recombinant DNA technology.” He then returned to the area and completed his combined MD, PhD at Stanford Medical School with his PhD focused on understanding the molecular basis of mammalian forebrain development with his PhD thesis entitled “Isolation and Characterization of TES-1/DLX-2: A Novel Homeobox Gene Expressed During Mammalian Forebrain Development.” After completion of his dual degree program, he was an intern and resident in Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and then completed his Pediatric Hematology/Oncology fellowship in the combined Boston Chidlren’s Hospital/Dana Farber Cancer Institute program. For his fellowship and post-doctoral research he worked with Dr. David Baltimore at MIT and CalTech where he began his studies in developing homologous recombination as a strategy to correct disease causing mutations in stem cells as definitive and curative therapy for children with genetic diseases of the blood, particularly sickle cell disease. Following his training with Dr. Baltimore, he took an independent faculty position at UT Southwestern in the Departments of Pediatrics and Biochemistry before again returning to Stanford in 2010 as an Associate Professor. During this time his work has been the first to demonstrate that gene correction could be achieved in human cells at frequencies that were high enough to potentially cure patients and is considered one of the pioneers and founders of the field of genome editing—a field that now encompasses thousands of labs and several new companies throughout the world. His research program continues to focus on developing genome editing by homologous recombination as curative therapy for children with genetic diseases but also has interests in the clonal dynamics of heterogeneous populations and the use of genome editing to better understand diseases that affect children including infant leukemias and genetic diseases that affect the muscle. Clinically, Dr. Porteus attends at the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital where he takes care of pediatric patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

Dr. Liat Rockah is the Vice President of Nuclease Technologies. Since joining Emendo in 2016, Liat has been responsible for leading the discovery, characterization and engineering of CRISPR-based novel nucleases. Liat directs the optimization of Emendo’s nucleases to achieve gene-editing based composition solutions that successfully target a desired indication, by using enzyme engineering and directed evolution and computational-driven design, such as machine-learning. Liat brings more than 15 years of experience and knowledge in the evolution of various mechanisms of the arms race of bacterial immune systems: the Toxin-Antitoxin, Restriction-modification, and CRISPR-Cas systems. Liat holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Protein Engineering from the Weizmann Institute with Prof. Dan Tawfik and further has been awarded post-doctoral fellowships with Prof. Ron Milo in synthetic metabolic pathway engineering.

Dan Peer is a Professor and the Director of the Laboratory of Precision NanoMedicine at Tel Aviv University (TAU). He is also the Vice President for Research and Development at Tel Aviv University. From 2016 - 2020, he was the Chair of Tel Aviv University Cancer Biology Research Center that includes 17 affiliated hospitals and from 2017 - Present, he is the Founding and Managing Director of the SPARK program of Translational Medicine at TAU. Prof. Peer is also the Chairman of Ramot, TAU Tech Transfer Company and Chairman of TAU Ventures, the Venture arm of TAUץ

Prof. Peer’s work was among the first to demonstrate systemic delivery of RNA molecules using targeted nanocarriers to the immune system and he pioneered the use of RNA interference (RNAi) in immune cells. In addition, his lab was the first to show systemic, cell specific delivery of modified mRNA to cells to induce therapeutic gene expression of desired proteins within the immune system that has enormous implications in cancer, inflammation and infection diseases (e.g. COVID 19 mRNA vaccines). In addition, his lab was the first to show high efficiency, systemic, cell specific therapeutic genome editing in cancer.

Prof. Peer has more than 130 pending and granted patents. Some of them have been licensed to several pharmaceutical companies and one is currently under registration (as a new biological drug in Inflammatory Bowel Disease). In addition, based on his work, five spin-off companies were generated aiming to bring innovative personalized medicine into clinical practice. 

Prof. Peer received more than 30 awards and honors and he serves on the scientific advisory board of more than 15 companies, and on the editorial board of more than 20 journals. He is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Controlled Release. Prof. Peer is a past President of the Israeli Chapter of the Controlled Release Society, and a Past Member of the Board of the Israel Young Academy.

Prof. Ronit Satchi-Fainaro (Ph.D.) is a Full Professor at Tel Aviv University, Head of the Cancer Research & Nanomedicine Laboratory at the Department of Physiology & Pharmacology at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, The Lion Chair in Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies and the Director of the Cancer Biology Research Center. She received her B.Pharm. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, her Ph.D. from the University of London and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston. She joined Tel Aviv University in 2006. The overarching goal of Prof. Satchi-Fainaro’s multidisciplinary research is to establish preclinical models of cancer in order to rationally design novel clinically-translatable nanomedicines targeting tumor cells and their stroma. Prof. Satchi-Fainaro serves on several Boards of Directors of pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, VCs and Editorial Boards, and is a founder of a start-up biotech company. She published more than 150 manuscripts and is named inventor on 60 patents.

Laura Sepp-Lorenzino, Ph.D. oversees Research and Early Development at  Intellia Therapeutics in her role as Chief Scientific Officer. Intellia’s leading CRISPR/Cas9-based platform supports a full-spectrum strategy, which deploys differentiated, modular solutions across in vivo and ex vivo therapeutic applications. Before joining Intellia, Laura was VP, Head of Nucleic Acid Therapies and member of the External Innovation team at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, with previous positions as VP and entrepreneur-in-residence at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Executive Director RNA Therapeutics at Merck & Co., Inc. In addition to her extensive experience in nucleic acid therapies, Laura has expertise in oncology drug discovery and development acquired earlier in her career by leading the Cancer Research Department at Merck West Point and working as an assistant attending molecular biologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She received her professional degree in Biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and both her M.S. and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from New York University. Laura is a member of the board of directors of Taysha Gene Therapies, the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine and the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society, and sits on the scientific advisory board of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Zymergen Inc., and the U.K. Nucleic Acid Therapy Accelerator.

Affiliation:

Dotan center for Advanced Therapies, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center

Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pathology, Tel Aviv University

Faculty of Life Sciences, School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry and Biophysics, Tel Aviv University

Eric Shifrut is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University and a principal investigator at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. Eric completed his graduate studies under the mentorship of Prof. Nir Friedman at the Weizmann Institute of Science, mapping the TCR repertoire in health and disease. For his postdoctoral training, he joined Alex Marson at UCSF and Gladstone Institutes to pioneer CRISPR discovery platforms to study primary human T cells. Today, Eric leads an independent team with the mission to leverage these achievements in CRISPR engineering to design best-in-class T cell therapies against cancer.