Nathaniel Fernhoff

Biography
Nathaniel Fernhoff, Ph.D., is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Orca Bio, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing high-precision allogeneic cell therapies for patients with blood cancers and other serious hematologic diseases. He is an inventor of Orca-Q, an investigational cell therapy designed to control the composition of donor immune cells used in allogeneic transplantation, with the goal of improving anti-cancer activity while reducing complications such as graft-versus-host disease. Before founding Orca Bio, Dr. Fernhoff was a Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Irving Weissman at Stanford University, where he studied stem-cell and immune biology. He earned his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and bachelor’s degrees in Biological Sciences and Mathematics from Stanford. His work combines cell purification, manufacturing, transplantation biology, and clinical development to make donor-derived cellular therapies more precise, reproducible, and accessible for patients with high-risk blood diseases.