Dr. Robert Hayes is the Chief Scientific Officer at Immusoft, where he oversees Immusoft’s preclinical research and spearheads the near-term advancement of ISP-001 for the treatment of Mucopolysaccharidosis type I (MPS I) into a clinical study, and additional Immune System Programming (ISP™) candidates towards clinical development.
With nearly two decades of biologics discovery and development experience, Dr. Hayes has a proven track record for building teams around new scientific concepts and technologies, including cell therapeutics, transposon systems, cancer vaccines, and bispecific monoclonal antibodies. He also has significant experience in forming partnerships to advance the development and application of novel therapeutic platforms.
Dr. Hayes obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Imperial College London as a Royal College of Science Scholar. He was awarded a Royal Society University Fellowship for the work contained in his thesis and spent three years studying protein biochemistry at University California, Berkeley. He then joined a start-up computational biology company called Xencor located in Pasadena, California where he helped establish their “Antibodies by Design” technology. Xencor has since collaborated with many of the top pharmaceutics companies to bring improved antibodies to the clinic.
After six years at Xencor, Dr. Hayes joined Janssen BioTherapeutics (Johnson & Johnson) where he co-founded and developed the vision and strategy for Centyrex, a stand-alone Janssen R&D biotechnology company that developed alternative scaffolds with applications beyond traditional protein therapeutics. In 2014, he became Head of Biologics at Amgen, responsible for leadership, operational and strategic management of all aspects of biologics preclinical discovery, including bioreagent generation, large molecule lead identification, biologics optimization, and transition into preclinical development and manufacturing.
