Shoreline Biosciences has poached the leader of Pfizer’s cancer vaccines unit, Robert Hollingsworth, Ph.D., to serve as chief scientific officer for the startup, which has recently beefed up its leadership, financing and partnerships.
Hollingsworth was chief scientific officer and vice president of cancer vaccines and immunotherapies at the New York Big Pharma, where he helped bring five programs into the clinic. Prior to joining Pfizer in 2017, he was a senior director of oncology research at MedImmune, where he contributed to the approval of Imfinzi, a cancer drug that serves as a “core backbone” of parent company AstraZeneca’s oncology strategy.
Now, he will lead scientific endeavors at Shoreline five months after the San Diego biotech received a $140 million financing boost from Gilead, BeiGene and a host of VC shops.
He will lead the biotech’s pipeline of natural killer cell therapies that use induced pluripotent stem cells. The technology has caught the attention of Gilead’s Kite Pharma, which inked a deal that could balloon to more than $2.3 billion for CAR-T treatments for blood cancers. The partnership could expand to include a macrophage program as well, the companies said in June 2021.
That same month, BeiGene doled out $45 million upfront to work with Shoreline on four therapeutic targets for various malignancies.
Aside from recent cash infusions and Big Pharma pacts, Shoreline has padded its management, as well. Hollingsworth joins weeks after the upstart added three vice presidents. Lisa Melia is leading clinical operations; Pinky Doshi is heading up regulatory affairs; and Paschalis Sideras is overseeing discovery immunobiology.