Dr. Gilles Besin joined Orbital Therapeutics in August 2022. He brings 15 years of research experience in immunology and vaccines for infectious diseases, oncology, and metabolic disorders, including rare diseases. Prior to joining Orbital Therapeutics, Dr. Besin led all discovery research efforts at Affinivax as Head of Discovery. In this role, he led a team to discover and develop vaccine candidates (targeting Staphylococcus, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, bacteria Clostridium difficile and more recently SARS CoV-2 vaccine), and support the development of the Streptococcus pneumoniae vaccine pipeline. Previously to Affinivax, Dr. Besin led the Moderna immunology platform and efforts to optimize the mRNA delivery platform and modulate T cell responses in cancer and autoimmune diseases using lipid nanoparticles. of mRNA. In addition, Dr. Besin has collaborated on numerous mRNA vaccines against cancer and infectious diseases, some in the clinical phase. Prior to Moderna, Dr. Besin was involved in the delivery of therapeutic nucleic acids and in the discovery of DNA vaccines mainly in cancer, for example hepatocellular carcinoma in In-Cell-ART (France). Along with these efforts, Dr. Besin has been involved in the development of mRNA vaccines in collaboration with Sanofi Pasteur and CureVac under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Prior to his experience in industry, Dr. Besin worked on the characterization of autoimmune T cells and dendritic cells in autoimmune diseases (type 1 diabetes) at the clinical research center of the University of Sherbrooke in Canada. Dr. Besin obtained his doctorate. in immunology from the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Germany and an engineering degree in biotechnology from ESBS in France.