Samuel Williams Email & Phone Number

South San Francisco , Ca, Us

Building advanced engineered cell therapies for the treatment of cancer

Foster City, Ca, Us

As the Vice President of Research, I built and led a multidisciplinary team of 40+ scientists to discover and develop next generation antibody-based immuno-oncology and anti-fibrotic therapeutics, currently in clinical evaluation in multiple disease settings. My principal duties centered around the management and coordination of functionally diverse research teams and business development activities with external partners.

Following Stemcentrx's acquisition by Abbvie, I continued as a principal scientist leading antibody drug conjugate discovery and development for oncology therapeutic applications. Additionally, I served as a project team lead for multiple pre-clinical development programs spanning melanoma, ovarian cancer, and lung cancer, leading to multiple INDs and clinically evaluated therapeutics.

South San Francisco, California, Us

As a scientist and senior scientist in the Cancer Biology group, I led efforts enabling antibody drug conjugate (ADC) target discovery, validation, and early stage development/IND-enabling preclinical oncology therapeutic studies. My team built and characterized 200+ patient-derived xenograft (PDX) tumor models and produced next-gen RNAseq (NGS) expression profiling and mutation characterization to identify novel oncology therapeutic opportunities. Further, we identified markers of, isolated, and characterized cancer stem cells in solid tumors. In this role I honed an extensive high-throughput multiparameter flow-cytometry and cell sorting skill set and gained significant experience in process and project management.

South San Francisco, California, Us

As a postdoctoral fellow in Vishva Dixit's group, I identified USP1 as a deubiquitinase that stabilizes ID proteins- inhibitors of differentiation, and promoters of stem-cell fate. These studies demonstrated that USP1 is overexpressed in osteosarcomas and can direct inappropriate and sustained expression of ID proteins, preventing normal cell cycle exit and differentiation. These studies further demonstrated that inhibition of USP1 or ID protein expression is sufficient to induce tumor differentiation in osteosarcoma. Finally, these studies support a normal role for USP1 in osteogenesis, linking normal mesenchymal stem cell biology and the cancer stem biology observed in osteosarcoma. These findings were published in Cell.Cell. 2011 Sept; 146: 918-30.

San Francisco, California, Us

Following my dissertation work, I had a brief transitional postdoctoral role in the same lab as my graduate studies, investigating mechanisms supporting HIV latency leading to the identification of novel kinetics of NF-kB family members' association with the HIV promoter and impacts on local chromatin state and transcriptional activity. This work led to the publications of papers in Journal of Virology and Cytokine.

San Francisco, California, Us

As a graduate student in Warner Greene's lab at the Gladstone Institute of Virology, I investigated the interplay of NF-kB signaling with HIV transcriptional activation and identified a novel negative regulatory feature of NF-kB p50 in suppressing HIV transcription, contributing to the establishment and maintenance of HIV latency. These studies produced publications in the Journal of Virology, JBC, Mol Cell Biol, and EMBO.

Optimized and implemented scintillation proximity assay and luciferase assay screens to identify small-molecule antagonists of receptor-ligand interactions in high-throughput (100,000+) format.

A.B., Human Biology

Ph.D., Biomedical Sciences Program

Education record