INTRODUCTION

Amy-Jo Casbon is a trained cancer immunologist with over 20 years of research experience and 8+ years of pharmaceutical industry experience leading early-stage pre-clinical programs focused on targeting tumor-associated myeloid cells, overcoming the suppressive TME and enhancing CAR-T cell persistence with a diverse set of therapeutic modalities. Her work includes bispecific antibodies, antibody cytokine fusions, and programmable CAR-T cells.

Dr. Amy-Jo Casbon received her Ph.D. at Indiana University School of Medicine, where her research was focused on myeloid cell activation in the context of microbial phagocytosis. With a growing interest to expand her knowledge of myeloid cells into the field of cancer immunology, Amy-Jo joined Zena Werb’s lab for her postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco. Given her background in neutrophils, macrophages, and myeloid development, she quickly became interested in the recent hype of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) and focused her research on identifying better markers for these cells and identifying the mechanism for their development and T cell suppressive function. During her post-doc, Amy-Jo identified a novel pathway of myeloid development in the BM that was responsible for the systemic accumulation of T cell-suppressive neutrophils, also commonly referred to as granulocyte MDSCs (gMDSCs), revealing G-CSF alone can induce the systemic expansion of gMDSCs. Following her post-doc, Amy-Jo has initiated and led several novel programs targeting myeloid cells for cancer immunotherapy at Amgen and Pionyr Immunotherapeutics and contributed to the development of two CAR-T clinical programs at ArsenalBio.