Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Bluestone serves as the chairman of Arcus’s Scientific Advisory Board. He is CEO and President of Sonoma Biotherapeutics and A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor in Metabolism and Endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco.… Dr. Bluestone is dedicated to researching the fundamental events that regulate T cell activation and development during immune responses to autoantigens and transplantation antigens. His laboratory was the first to demonstrate that T cell signaling via CTLA4 down-regulates T cell proliferation and cytokine production, and his current area of focus is drugs that will “turn off” selected parts of the immune system.

Dr. Garcia is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He also serves as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine across 2 departments (Molecular and Cellular Physiology and Structural Biology). … He studies the structural, mechanistic, and functional aspects of receptor-ligand interactions that play important roles in disease. His research focuses on the mechanisms of ligand binding and receptor activation and how to use this information to develop therapeutics.

Dr. Lacey is the retired former SVP of Discovery Research at Amgen. At the end of his tenure he oversaw a research organization of approximately 1200 encompassing four broad therapeutic areas: inflammation, oncology, metabolic disorders and neurosciences. …The organization’s work focused on using both large and small molecules to inhibit validated targets across these focus areas. Since retiring from Amgen, he has assisted a number of private companies as a scientific advisor and independent director.

Dr. Ribas is an internationally recognized physician-scientist who conducts translational and clinical research to understand how the immune system can be used to treat cancer. He has been a leader in the research and clinical development of multiple types of therapeutic agents, including immune checkpoint inhibitors, gene-engineered T cells, and BRAF-targeted therapies.… Dr. Ribas has served as principal investigator for multiple trials, including those involving pembrolizumab. Dr. Ribas is a Professor at UCLA, Director of the Tumor Immunology Program at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Director of the UCLA Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy Center. He is currently the President-Elect for the American Association of Cancer Research.

Dr. Spranger is currently an Assistant Professor of Biology at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She researches the interactions between cancer and the immune system, … with the goal of improving existing immunotherapies or developing novel therapeutic approaches. Dr Spranger is primarily interested in what factors contribute to T cell exclusion from the tumor microenvironment, including tumor cell-intrinsic, tissue-macroenvironmental or environmental factors. Her lab focuses on lung cancer and pancreatic cancer.