Vanessa Taylor, Ph.D.

As Chief Scientific Officer, Vanessa is responsible for building Terray’s internal and partnered pipeline from discovery through the clinic. She also directs Terray’s partnered programs with pharma partners, including BMS, and Gilead, and the co-development program with Odyssey Therapeutics. With over 30 years of experience in research and drug discovery, she brings expertise in all aspects of preclinical drug development in immunology and oncology. She built and leads a team of multidisciplinary scientists that identifies targets, enables them on Terray’s proprietary platform, and implements the lead optimization strategy to progress pipeline programs.

Prior to joining Terray, Vanessa spent 19 years at Rigel Pharmaceuticals, where her last role was Vice President of Biology, responsible for leading preclinical research programs from target identification to lead candidate selection. She was directly involved in advancing seven drug candidates into clinical studies focused on inflammation, cancer, and rare diseases and partnering on three additional programs. Vanessa received her B.S. from Durham University in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and her Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Cambridge. She completed her postdoctoral training at Oxford University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco. She lives with her family in San Francisco.