Sunil Bhakta
Vice President, Research Operations
Sunil Bhakta has over 30 years of research experience in Pharma/Biotech, including 16+ years of experience in oncology drug discovery and development. Sunil started his career at Syntex/Roche Bioscience as a molecular biologist after obtaining his bachelor's degree in biological sciences. At Roche, Sunil worked on GPCRs and chemokine programs through lead identification and optimization. After a decade at Roche, Sunil moved to a startup company, Abgenix, and then to Thios Pharmaceuticals. At Abgenix, he developed several functional assays for identifying antibody-neutralizing activity through different platforms of high-throughput screening, which led to identification of functional blocking antibodies, resulting in patent applications. Sunil’s team at Thios identified lead candidates for the sulfoadhesin therapeutic program. Sunil moved to Genentech in 2005, where his main research focus was on novel THIOMAB-based antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). Sunil also identified and validated several tumor antigens for the ADC platform. Later, his research focused on engaging multiple receptors with bispecific/trispecific antibodies to generate better immunotherapy for solid malignancies through elucidating the molecular mechanisms involved in human cancers, with the intent to identify and develop novel therapeutic drugs.