About CellTx

Dr. Ruben Rodriguez is currently the owner of CellTx Consulting LLC. He obtained his PhD at the Hospital Clinic (Barcelona) and later conducted his postdoctoral studies at Salk Institute for Biological Studies advancing the fields of neurobiology and stem cell biology respectively.

He started his industry career at Kite Pharma, where he established a third generation lentiviral platform and developed CAR-T constructs to support Phase 1, first-in-human clinical trials. He also led Kite's collaboration with Cell Design Labs which focused on the development of molecular switch-controlled CAR-T cells, a collaboration that grew into an acquisition of Cell Design Labs by Kite. In addition, Dr. Rodriguez served as the pre-clinical lead of the collaboration of Kite and Sangamo in the utilization of zinc-finger nucleases in the development of allogeneic CAR-T cells. He also was integral in the design and execution of an academic collaboration directed at the derivation of T cells from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

Dr. Rodriguez later joined Instil Bio as Global Head of Research, where he initially developed the biomarker and sample collection plan of a registrational trial of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) in metastatic melanoma. Simultaneously, he led the preclinical program to develop a novel genetically engineered TIL program and was integral in the delivery of a timely IND approval. In addition, Dr. Rodriguez oversaw Instil Bio's product pipeline and contributed to several new lines of scientific inquiry and several publications on engineered TILs.

On a side note, Ruben Rodriguez is a bit of a nerd: his favorite novel is Diaspora by Greg Egan, and he uses some of his spare time to do 3D printing and flex some of his limited computer programming skills.