If you’d told Jim Wilson three years ago that he’d be stepping down as director of the University of Pennsylvania’s storied Gene Therapy Program, he wouldn’t have believed you. And yet he’s now doing exactly that.
Wilson, a gene therapy pioneer who has spent decades devising ways to deliver functional copies of missing or defective genes to patients, recently announced that he’s leaving Penn to found a pair of companies focused on developing gene therapies and offering supportive services to other biotechs. In an interview with STAT, Wilson said the move was driven by a desire to show that biotechs can successfully commercialize gene therapies for rare diseases. With other companies floundering in this space and shuttering their programs before therapies can ever reach patients, he concluded he would have to do it himself.
“There was an unprecedented opportunity scientifically,” he said. “What we decided is that this may be a time when others are sort of walking away, [but] we can lean into this.”
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