Aya Jakobovits is president and CEO of Kite Pharma and a venture partner with Orbimed Partners' Israel team. Kite, her fourth biotech startup, is developing therapies that manipulate the immune system to fight cancer. Prior to Kite, she was head of research and development at Agensys, an affiliate of Astellas Pharmaceuticals. She led Agensys' transition from a small gene discovery lab into a fully integrated biotech company. Under her leadership, the company established partnerships with major pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Before Agensys, Jakobovits served as principal scientist at Abgenix, which was spun out of Cell Genesys, based on XenoMouse technology developed under her leadership. Amgen acquired Abgenix for $2.2 billion. She received her Ph.D. in life sciences from the Weizmann Institute of Sciences, Israel, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Genentech and the University of California, San Francisco. Jakobovits is an author of over 50 scientific publications and inventor on over 100 patents.

Panel:
Financial Innovations for Early-Stage Drug Development

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