Travis S. Young

Dr. Travis Young is the Vice President of Biologics at Calibr, a division of Scripps Research and holds an appointment as Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research. He received a BS in biochemistry from Boston College and a PhD in chemical biology from The Scripps Research Institute as an ARCS scholar. At Scripps, his work focused on the development of unnatural amino acid incorporation methodologies to improve the properties of therapeutic proteins. This work was foundational for the development of programs in the Calibr pipeline today, including a bispecific antibody for prostate cancer which will enter clinical trials next year. After receiving his PhD, he completed a postdoc at Harvard Medical School with an NIH fellowship, in the department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology with Dr. Christopher T Walsh.

Dr. Young was a member of the founding group of principal investigators at Calibr and serves as the lead investigator on multiple bench-to-bedside antibody and cellular therapy-based programs. Dr. Young maintains a research group focused in the development of novel therapeutics at the interface between protein engineering and synthetic biology. This research spans multiple disease indications including cancer, autoimmune, metabolic disorders, and infectious disease. His work has been highly awarded and received support from the Wellcome Trust, NIH (National Cancer Institute), Department of Defense, Mesothelioma Research foundation, American Cancer Society, among others. His work has resulted in numerous publications and patents with >2250 citations in the past 5 years. Dr. Young has led two programs from concept into first-in-human clinical trials while at Calibr: a bispecific antibody for prostate cancer and a unique switchable CAR-T cell therapy platform for blood cancer.