John Maher
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Leucid Bio
A consultant immunologist at Eastbourne Hospital and King’s Health Partners, as well as a clinical academic at King’s College London (KCL), Maher founded the CAR Mechanics group at KCL in 2004, focusing on adoptive immunotherapy using CAR-engineered and gamma delta T cells.
Maher has spent over 25 years advancing CAR T-cell therapy for solid tumors and led the first academic CAR-T trial for head and neck cancer in 2015. He now oversees the AERIAL trial, evaluating Leucid’s lead candidate, LEU011, in patients with relapsed or refractory solid tumors. In 2024, he was lead author in a study that describes a technology to render the immune response regulator IL-18 subject to activation by Granzyme B, a protein that helps cytotoxic T cells and natural killer cells kill infected or cancerous cells, thereby restricting the biological activity of pro-inflammatory CAR T-cell armouring cytokine to conditions in which the host T-cell is activated.
“Several years ago, I took one second generation CAR T cell product into the clinic, a panErbB-targeted CAR known as T4 immunotherapy. This proved safe when we injected the product directly into recurrent head and neck tumours. However, while we saw signals of tumour control, the results were nowhere near those reported in hematological malignancy. This experience convinced me that we need to radically redesign the CAR architecture to tackle solid tumors.”
