Brian Weitzner

Biography
Dr. Weitzner leads a world class team at Outpace Bio that combines protein design, machine learning and custom software to create mechanism driven solutions to dramatically improve the efficacy and safety of cell and gene therapies. Brian co founded OpenFold in 2022 to democratize AI for biology and enable new cures to come to market that would be impossible to discover without AI. Before co founding Outpace in 2020, Brian conducted his doctoral work with Jeff Gray at the Johns Hopkins University and studied protein design with David Baker as a WRF Innovation Fellow at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. Brian has been a core developer and leader in the Rosetta Commons for over 15 years where he develops physics based protein modeling methods and trains the next generation of protein designers. Brian made the jump to industry in 2018 as one the first scientists to join Lyell Immunopharma.

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Talk
Creating Cell Therapies for Solid Tumors with Protein Design
Cell therapies have the potential to cure a wide array of diseases but have not been successful when targeting solid tumors, the vast majority of cancers. We leverage knowledge about the underlying molecular basis of these limitations to design proteinbased interventions to harness the full potential of cellular medicines and break free from default biology.