Meet John Maher

John has worked in CAR T immunotherapy for more than 25 years, with a particular focus on solid tumors. He is Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Leucid Bio and a clinical academic at King’s College London, where he established CAR T research in 2004 and leads the CAR Mechanics group, focused on adoptive immunotherapy using CAR-engineered and gamma delta T cells.

John’s work has helped shape the field from its early engineering principles through to clinical translation. During his time in Michel Sadelain’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he developed second-generation CARs building on the work of Helene Finney, an approach that has since had major clinical impact in hematological malignancies. At Leucid Bio, he is now advancing the company’s Lateral CAR platform for solid tumors. Its lead program, LEU011, is being evaluated in the AERIAL Phase 1/2 trial in patients with relapsed or refractory NKG2D ligand-expressing solid tumors.

“As a field, we have extraordinary ideas, but too many therapies remain slow, complex, expensive, and difficult to manufacture at scale. In autologous cell therapy especially, vein-to-vein time, manufacturing variability, release testing, logistics, and cost all limit impact.”