About Helen Sabzevari

Dr. Helen Sabzevari is President and CEO of Precigen and member of the Precigen Board of Directors. Dr. Sabzevari brings extensive expertise in research and development of immunotherapy-based therapeutics as well as experience translating novel treatments from pre-clinical stage into the clinic. From 2015 to 2017, Dr. Sabzevari co-founded and served as Chief Scientific Officer of Compass Therapeutics, a fully-integrated drug discovery and development company focused on manipulating the immune system to treat human disease. From 2008 to 2014, Dr. Sabzevari served as Senior Vice President of Immuno-Oncology as well as Global Head of Immunotherapy, Oncology, Global Research and Early Development at EMD Serono (a subsidiary of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany). During her tenure, she led the immuno-oncology discovery and early development translational innovation platform and brought forward numerous pre-clinical and clinical assets including avelumab, an approved anti-programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) checkpoint inhibitor. From 1998 to 2008, Dr. Sabzevari led the Molecular Immunology Group at the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology at the US National Cancer Institute (LTIB-NCI), where she was focused on design, development and delivery of novel vaccines and immunotherapies for a range of human cancers. Dr. Sabzevari’s contributions in the field of tumor immunology earned her the National Institutes of Health (NIH) merit award for major contribution to the field of cancer immunotherapy, and she has also received the Mass High Tech’s Women to Watch Award, the PharmaVOICE 100 Award (2013 and 2022) and the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Team Science Award for her work on the NCI Cancer Immunotherapy Program Team. Most recently, Dr. Sabzevari was recognized on the Forbes 50 over 50: The Visionary List, Maryland’s Top 100 Women by The Daily Record and PM360’s Elite 100 in the Strategists category. Dr. Sabzevari received her doctorate degree in cell and molecular immunology and completed her postdoctoral work at the department of immunology at the Scripps Research Institute working on various immunotherapeutic modalities in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases.