Kole Roybal, PhD

Kole T. Roybal, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Director of the PICI Center at the University of California, San Francisco and the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and is an inaugural Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator. He is also the deputy director of the UCSF Center for Synthetic Immunology, which was recently funded by the Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

The Roybal Lab harnesses the tools of synthetic biology and immunology to control and customize immune cell therapeutics for cancer and autoimmunity. Dr. Roybal’s body of work was foundational to the next-generation immune cell therapy company Cell Design Labs, where he was a founding scientist. Cell Design Labs was acquired by Gilead at the end of 2017. Dr. Roybal was also instrumental in developing universal CAR T-cell technology in collaboration with Xyphos Biosciences, which was acquired by Astellas at the end of 2019. He has now co-founded ArsenalBio, which focuses on building cellular therapies for solid tumors with a combination of cutting-edge synthetic biology and gene-editing technologies.

In 2018 he received the Sartorius and Science Magazine Prize for Regenerative Medicine and Cell Therapy and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

Dr. Roybal holds a PhD in immunology from The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and was a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Wendell A. Lim, PhD, at UCSF and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

• 2013: University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, PhD, Immunology
• 2005: Austin College, TX, BA Biology