Axel Hoos

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT AXEL HOOS

Dr. Axel Hoos is a physician-scientist, biopharma executive and entrepreneur. His interests focus on transformational drug development and building of life science organizations. Most recently he served as CEO of Scorpion Therapeutics, a next-gen biotech company focused on Precision Oncology 2.0 for best-in-class small molecule design. He oversaw its built to a team of 120, shaping its culture, pipeline, multi-tech platform, business development and fundraising strategy, and transitioned it from early discovery to the clinical stage. In 3 years Scorpion created 3 clinical programs for mutPI3Ka, EGFR Exon20, and EGFR C797S, and business partnerships with AstraZeneca and Pierre Fabre. The mutPI3Ka program demonstrated best-in-class clinical data in its FTIH study, and was acquired by Eli Lilly for $2.5B.Previously, he was Senior Vice President, R&D Governance Chair, and Therapeutic Area (TA) Head for Oncology at GSK, overseeing the re-building of the Oncology Division after its divestment to Novartis in 2015. Partnerships, acquisitions and licensing deals included Tesaro, Merck-Serono, Adaptimmune, Lyell, Immatics, Ideaya, Surface Oncology, and iTeos.Further, Dr. Hoos served as Executive Chair of the Board of the Sabin Vaccine Institute (SVI), a global health organization, overseeing its re-structuring and renewal of R&D strategy, and as the Global Medical Lead in Immunology/Oncology at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), where he and his team developed Yervoy® (ipilimumab), the first checkpoint inhibitor drug, and created the term Immuno-Oncology (IO) together with a new IO drug development paradigm (Nat. Rev. Drug Discovery 2016, 15(4): 235-47). The discovery of ipilimumab’s scientific mechanism was honored with the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine to Dr. James Allison in 2018. Dr. Hoos also served as Director on the Boards of biotechnology companies NextPoint Therapeutics, and TCR2, and Co-Founder and Director of Imugene. He further served as Co-Director of the Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium (CIC), Scientific Advisory Board Member of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), and Co-Founder and Executive Committee member of the Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT) of the Biden Cancer Moonshot. Dr. Hoos holds an MD from Ruprecht-Karls-University and a PhD from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) under Nobel Laureate Harald zur Hausen, in Heidelberg, Germany. He further trained at the Technical University in Munich and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and is an alumnus of Harvard Business School.