Fyodor D. Urnov BSc, PhD

Fyodor Urnov, Ph.D., is Associate Director at the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, where he shares broad responsibility for defining and leading the overall scientific effort. Prior to joining Altius, Dr Urnov was Vice President, Discovery and Translational Research, at Sangamo Therapeutics, where he co-developed human genome editing with engineered nucleases (2005), and then led the Company’s R&D efforts to deploy genome editing for crop trait engineering in partnership with Dow AgroSciences (2009), and co-managed Sangamo’s partnership with Sigma-Aldrich for the generation of engineered cell lines for manufacturing, transgenic animals and research reagents (2010).

During 2010-16, he lead IND-enabling efforts on new disease indications, including genome editing for the hemoglobinopathies (parnered with Biogen, IND accepted 2017), and allele-specific targeted gene regulation with engineered transcription factors for neurodegenerative disease (partnered with Pfizer). He is an author of more than 70 scientific publications and an inventor on more than 130 issued and pending U.S. patents related to genome editing and targeted gene regulation technology. Prior to joining Sangamo, Dr. Urnov was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in the laboratory of Dr Alan P. Wolffe, where he trained in the study of chromatin-based genome regulatory processes in metazoa.

Dr. Urnov received his Ph.D. in Biology from Brown University, where he studied chromatin-based integration of genome control in the laboratory of Dr Susan A. Gerbi, and his B.Sc. in Biology from Moscow State University, where he was a student in the Department of Virology led by Dr Joseph G. Atabekov.