Simon Wain-Hobson, PhD

Simon is an Emeritus professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris with more than 230 scientific papers to his credit. He started his work there on hepatitis B virus and switched to HIV following the isolation of the virus by Luc Montagnier. He was the first to publish the genetic blueprint of HIV. This allowed the granting of numerous patents for the detection of HIV.

There followed more than 25 years of work devoted to studying the pathology of this virus and how it demolished remorselessly the immune system.

Through one of the quirks of science that science conjures up, his group found a way from HIV to cancer biology. Being the first to show that a novel human enzyme was capable of mutating the human genome, he contributed to the acceptance that genome damage by such enzyme is every bit as important to oncogenesis as cigarette smoking or UV light. After expanding his work in cancer, it was a short step to cancer biotech.

He joined NKILT Therapeutics as a co-founder in 2022, making it is second co-founded biotech since 2010 in the field of cancer therapeutics.

He has a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Oxford followed by an EMBO long-term fellowship at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. This was followed by his move to the Pasteur Institute.

He’s an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), Academia Europa and is a rare foreign member of the US National Academy of Inventers.

Simon collects 18 century English drinking glasses and has published numerous articles on the subject.