Gender Female
Margo Roberts, Ph.D., served as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Kite Pharma, Inc. (“Kite”) (acquired by Gilead Sciences, Inc. in October 2017) starting in 2013, where she built a talented research organization that played an instrumental role in the successful development of Yescarta®, and the clinical advancement of additional
CAR/TCR-engineered T-cell therapies. Subsequent to her role as CSO, Margo Roberts served as Senior Vice President of Discovery Research at Kite in order to focus on the development of next generation therapeutic approaches, including heading up Kite’s universal allogeneic T-cell programs.
Margo Roberts has almost three decades of biomedical research experience in both biotechnology and academia. Prior to her tenure at Kite, Margo Roberts was Principal Scientist and Director of Immune and Cell Therapy at Cell Genesys, Inc. where she led the development and application of CAR technology to T-cells and stem cells, culminating in the very first CAR T-cell clinical trial in 1994. Margo Roberts was also an associate professor at the University of Virginia, has authored more than thirty scientific publications, and is the inventor on thirteen issued U.S. patents and three published U.S. patent applications. Margo Roberts received both her Bachelor of Science degree with honors and her Ph.D. degree from the University of Leeds in England.
