Our Leadership
Katherine High, M.D.
Director
Dr. Katherine High currently serves as President, Therapeutics, AskBio (wholly owned subsidiary of Bayer AG) which is focused on development of gene therapeutics. Previously she was Co-Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Spark Therapeutics (NASDAQ: ONCE), and prior to that a Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. High is an accomplished hematologist with a longstanding interest in gene therapy for genetic disease. Her pioneering bench-to-bedside studies of gene therapy for hemophilia led to a series of studies that characterized the human immune response to adeno-associated virus vectors in various target tissues. Kathy’s work has evolved to encompass clinical translation of potential genetic therapies for multiple inherited disorders. At Spark she led the team that achieved the first approval of an AAV product in the U.S.
As the Director of the Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Philadelphia, PA, Kathy assembled a multidisciplinary team of scientists and researchers to discover new gene and cell therapies for genetic diseases and facilitate rapid translation of preclinical discoveries into clinical application. At Penn and CHOP, she was also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She served a 5-year term on the US Food and Drug Administration’s Advisory Committee on Cell, Tissue, and Gene Therapies and is a past President of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT). She received her A.B. in chemistry from Harvard University, and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (US), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal College of Physicians (London) and the National Academy of Sciences (US). Dr. High was just awarded the ASGCT’s prestigious Jerry Mendell Award for Translational Science which recognized her “extensive work required to bring gene and cell therapies to clinical trial”.