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 downregulates 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. Higgins currently serves as Senior Vice President Research, Innovation & Portfolio at Gilead Sciences, Inc. She joined Gilead in 2010 and in her first nine years led Biology, leading a significant expansion of the therapeutic area scope and capabilities of the department. …

Prior to joining Gilead, Dr. Higgins previously served as the President & CEO of InteKrin Therapeutics and as Head of Research at Scios, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company, where she provided leadership for drug discovery, preclinical development, and translational medicine. Dr. Higgins obtained her BA degree in Behavioral Physiology from Kenyon College and her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and conducted her post-doctoral research in Molecular Genetics at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Higgins currently serves on the Supervisory Board of Galapagos and the Board of Directors of Tizona Therapeutics.

Dr. Lacey has had a distinguished academic and highly accomplished biopharmaceutical industry career discovering and creating life-changing and critical quality of life improvement therapies for patients. …During his 17-year tenure at Amgen, Dr. Lacey oversaw Amgen’s Discovery Research organization during a key period in the company’s history, leading more than 1,200 scientists across a portfolio of drug discovery and development projects in the therapeutic areas of hematology/oncology, inflammation, metabolic disorders, and neuroscience.

At Amgen, Dr. Lacey helped make significant advancements in the understanding of bone biology, playing a fundamental role in the discovery of osteoprotegerin (OPG) and in the understanding of the RANK/RANK ligand pathway in bone metabolism that paved the way for the development of Prolia® (denosumab) for osteoporosis and XGEVA® for cancer-­related bone diseases, which had combined annual sales of more than $2 billion. Denosumab has received a number of awards including the U.S. 2011 Prix Galien award for best new biotechnology product. Dr. Lacey also initiated the clinical studies of keratinocyte growth factor (KGF), which ultimately was approved as Kepivance® (palifermin) for chemotherapy patients with severe oral mucositis. Prior to joining Amgen, Dr. Lacey was on the faculty at Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri, where he taught pathology residents and medical students, performed professional medical service in anatomic pathology, and pursued NIH-funded research in bone cell biology.

Dr. Lacey received his bachelor’s degree in biology and his MD degree from the University of Colorado where he served as Chief Resident of Anatomic Pathology in his final year of training. He is board certified in anatomical pathology. Dr. Lacey currently serves as a Board member for several biotech companies and acts as an esteemed advisor to a number of academic institutions, biotechnology companies, and venture capital firms.

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 also served as the President for the American Association of Cancer Research from 2020 to 2021.

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.