INTRODUCTION

Mark earned his PhD at UCSF in the laboratory of Dr. William Rutter. He remained at UCSF for a post-doc in the Peterlin lab, working on the HIV TAT transcriptional activator. Thereafter, Mark spent 10 years at Chiron working with Michael Houghton on the Hepatitis C Virus, as well as exploring DNA vaccination with electroporation as a means to promote cellular immune responses. Mark joined Medarex in 2000 (acquired by BMS in 2009), working with Dr. Alan Korman, where they and others advanced the first anti-PD-1 antibody (Nivolumab/Opdivo) to enter the clinic. This was followed by the development of the combination of Ipilimumab and Nivolumab with approval for multiple indications. Mark was also a coinventor of the anti-LAG-3 antibody, which also advanced to approval. Mark was a key contributor in the preclinical investigation of many immunotherapy candidate agents, helping to develop assays and evaluating surrogates in animal models. Mark departed from BMS after 17 years and cofounded Walking Fish Therapeutics, which was focused on ex vivo engineered B cells as factories for proteins of therapeutic value. Mark is a co-author on 60 publications and has numerous issued patents.