Gilles Besin, Ph.D.

Chief Scientific Officer at Orbital Therapeutics

Speaker

With more than 15 years of research experience in immunology and vaccines for infectious diseases, oncology, and metabolic disorders, including rare diseases, Dr. Gilles Besin is now the CSO of Orbital Therapeutics. Prior to joining Orbital Therapeutics, Dr. Besin led all discovery research efforts at Affinivax as Head of Discovery. In this role, he led a team to discover and develop vaccine candidates (targeting Staphylococcus, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, bacteria Clostridium difficile and more recently SARS CoV-2 vaccine) and support the development of the Streptococcus pneumoniae vaccine pipeline. In 2022, Affinivax was acquired by GSK and the clinical development of some of the vaccines mentioned is ongoing. Previously to Affinivax, Dr. Besin led the Moderna immunology platform and efforts to optimize the mRNA delivery platform and modulate T cell responses in cancer and autoimmune diseases using lipid nanoparticles. In addition, Dr. Besin has collaborated on numerous mRNA vaccines against cancer and infectious diseases, some in the clinical phase. Prior to Moderna, Dr. Besin was involved in the delivery of therapeutic nucleic acids and has been involved in the development of mRNA vaccines in collaboration with Sanofi Pasteur and CureVac under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).