Dr. Blythe Sather received her PhD from the University of Washington and did her postdoctoral work on lentiviral gene therapies at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. During this time, she led a team doing ground-breaking work on the use of gene editing and chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) in primary T-cells for HIV therapy.
In 2014, she moved to Juno Therapeutics, where she was instrumental in building their CAR T cell development platform and leading the multiple myeloma CAR T cell program. At Juno, she also led a research collaboration with Editas to bring CRISPR-mediated gene editing to CAR and TCR T cell products.
In 2018, she joined Lyell Immunopharma, where she helped build the initial research pipeline and led a team developing several next-generation CAR and TCR products for solid tumours. Then in 2021, she left Lyell to join Tune Therapeutics as Vice President and Head of Research – excited by the vast potential of epigenome editing technology to address a broader suite of products and patients.