Jay Harper

Jay Harper has over 20 years of industry experience in oncology drug discovery and is currently a Director in Oncology Targeted Discovery at AstraZeneca. Since joining in 2011, Jay has used his experience to progress AstraZeneca’s ADC efforts on two fronts. Initially he was an ADC Portfolio Project lead, advancing promising ADC candidates through preclinical research and into development. For the past 6 years he has been the Bioscience lead of AstraZeneca’s ADC Platform team whose remit is to 1) innovate the payload, linker and antibody technologies that will help comprise their next generation of ADCs, and 2) characterize mechanisms of resistance and sensitivity to their validated payloads in order to identify patient selection strategies or combination partners that will maximize clinical benefit.

Prior to MedImmune/AstraZeneca, Jay worked at Genzyme to advance their anti-TGFB antibody, GC1008, through the pipeline and into clinical trials for cancer. Additionally, he helped build ADC capabilities through both core capability development and by leading specific ADC project teams. He received his Ph.D. in Cell & Developmental Biology from Harvard University in 2000 and then conducted postdoctoral research on the initiation of the angiogenic switch with Dr. Marsha Moses in the Vascular Biology Department at Boston Children’s Hospital.