Martin Pule's Biography

Martin Pule, Director Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) Programme. Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, UCL Autolus

Martin Pule and his group work on engineering mammalian cells for therapeutic applications. Most of our work involves engineering proteins and vectors for eukaryotic expression, testing in small animals and then with some promising approaches, moving to clinical studies. We have worked extensively on optimizing Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CARS). Martin Pule started his scientific career working in Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, as a traveling Fulbright scholar, He was the first to describe third generation forms of these CARS which transmit activation, proliferation and survival signal to the transduced T-cells. While at Baylor, Martin Pule also engineered a novel Suicide gene "iCasp9", used in clinical studies. Martin Pule's work in Baylor culminated in testing of a CAR in clinical study in children with a solid cancer called Neuroblastoma. Initially funded by an MRC clinician-scientist fellowship and project grant funding from the BBSRC, he has established a research group in the new UCL Cancer Institute. This group is now 22 strong and is focused on 5 facets of cellular therapy: (1) Synthetic biology approaches for advanced T-cell engineering; (2) pre-clinical development of promising therapeutic strategies; (3) scale-up, and translation; (4) clinical experimentation; (5) Molecular imaging strategies to track engineered T-cells in human subjects. Martin Pule leads the UCL Chimeric Antigen Receptor programme. He is the coordinator of the EU FP7 ATECT consortium. Martin Pule is coordinator of the NIHR CAR19 i4i programme. Martin Pule as well as being a senior Lecturer in UCL, holds an honorary consultant post as a clinical haematologist in the UCL Hospital (UCLH) with lymphoma as his main clinical interest.His laboratory receives funding from Cellectis Therapeutics, a key industrial collaborator, for contract research. This collaboration allows genomic editing using TALENs to be combined with lentiviral vector transduction to generate off-the-shelf T-cells. Martin Pule is founder and CSO of Autolus Ltd founded in 2014 which is a synthetic biology / CAR company which was the largest series A in European biotech and is developing next-generation engineered immune-cell technology.