G-Rex Grant Tour San Diego, CA

G-Rex® Grant Tour

Supporting the Emily Whitehead Foundation

SAN DIEGO

Coming to San Diego

The G-Rex Grant Program is a transformational initiative that culminated in the awarding of >300 G-Rex Grants and >$40M in resources and has resulted in a powerful coalition of organizations and individuals working to bring hope to cancer and autoimmune patients through adoptive cell and gene therapy.

In 2026, ScaleReady will host a series of 12-events around the United States with the goals of:

Rallying, fostering, and investing in the local cell & gene therapy community
Promoting transparency and collaboration among like-minded individuals and organizations workings towards a common goal
Catalyzing scienfitic and clinical progress through a shared sense of duty to the patients we all serve
Spotlighting the breadth of diverse innovative cell and gene therapy approaches being powered by G-Rex.

Hear from leaders bringing hope to patients through advanced cell & gene therapies

Meet Colin Exline

Colin Exline leads the Research and Development efforts at Papillon Therapeutics and has been working in regenerative medicine for over 15 years. He has developed methods to efficiently edit genomes by both virally and non-virally. These methods have been employed while leading projects in HSPC to create anti-viral immune systems and within organ transplantation settings to decrease the risk of rejection for both xeno- and traditional transplantation. He earned his PhD from the University of Iowa studying viral gene expression.

Meet Dr. Kaufmann

Dr. Kaufman is a native of Minnesota (USA). He did his undergraduate work at Stanford University and then completed an MD and a PhD (in Immunology) at the Mayo Medical School and Mayo Graduate School in Rochester, MN. He then completed both residency training in Internal Medicine and a fellowship training in Hematology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Dr. Kaufman was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota from 2002- 2016. In 2016, Dr. Kaufman moved to San Diego to be a Professor in the Department of Medicine, Divisions of Regenerative Medicine and BMT at UC San Diego School of Medicine. At UCSD, he does clinical work in hematology/BMT and serves as the Director of the Cell Therapy program. He also oversees the UCSD Advanced Cell Therapy Laboratory (ACTL) that provides GMP cell manufacturing to translate new cell-based therapies to clinical trials. Research in the Kaufman lab uses human pluripotent stem cells to understand the development of blood and immune cells. Recent studies have focused on the ability to use human iPSC-derived natural killer (NK) cells to kill diverse types of human cancer cells. These studies have used cellular engineering to enhance the anti-tumor activity of the iPSC-derived NK cells by expression of novel chimeric antigen receptors, stabilized expression of CD16, and other strategies. This work has now been translated into clinical trials for treatment of relapsed/refractory cancers- both hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. Additional studies aim to develop novel approaches for in vivo cell engineering to provide a potentially more efficient strategy to produce targeted, cell-based cancer therapies.

Meet Dr. MacLeod

Dr. MacLeod is an experienced biotechnology leader and innovator in the cell therapy space with 20 years of experience in immunology, oncology, cancer immunotherapy, gene-editing and virology. Throughout his career, Dan has successfully led numerous teams in translating platform technologies into clinical candidate cell therapies, including four CAR-T therapies that advanced from early-stage research through IND-enabling studies and into Phase 1/2 clinical trials. As Chief Scientific Officer at Optieum Biotechnologies, Dan leads R&D for OPTF01, an autologous CAR T targeting Fibroblast Activation Protein Alpha (FAPα) for Glioblastoma and additional solid tumor indications. He also oversees a growing pipeline of CAR T candidates for autologous and in vivo modalities spanning oncology, fibrosis, and autoimmunity. Prior to Optieum, Dan was Senior Vice President of Discovery at ImmunoScape, where he led R&D for autologous TCR-T cell therapies. He also held roles of increasing responsibility during his time at Precision BioSciences, leading the discovery and development of gene-edited, allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies. Earlier in his career, Dan held roles at GlaxoSmithKline and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, and B.A. at Northwestern University.

Event Sponsors

The G-Rex Grant Tour will be co-produced by the Emily Whitehead Foundation (EWF) and all sponsorship fees will go directly to support the EWF mission “to support patients and caregivers affected by cancer and rare diseases, and advocate for all patients who can be treated with advanced therapies”.

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G-Rex Grant
Tour 2026

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