Dr. Lore Gruenbaum joined LLS in 2020 as the Vice President for the Therapy Acceleration Program (TAP), the LLS venture philanthropy program aiming to accelerate high-risk, innovative blood cancer therapeutics. She brings 20 years of drug discovery and clinical development experience to LLS working on small molecules, biologics, RNA-directed and cell therapies in multiple therapeutic areas including oncology, immunology, virology and neuroscience. Most recently, Dr. Gruenbaum was employed as the Vice President, Biology at Gotham Therapeutics pioneering drug discovery in Epitranscriptomics. Prior to this, she was part of the executive leadership team at Applied Biomath where she led collaborative mechanistic modeling projects to accelerate and de-risk drug development for biotech and pharma and acted as the principal investigator on a NIH small business grant. Dr. Gruenbaum held roles of increasing responsibility at Boehringer Ingelheim and Roche Pharmaceuticals driving technical innovation, predictive toxicology, novel mechanistic and biomarker strategies for drug discovery and clinical projects. She completed her Ph.D. at Free University of Berlin with ‘summa cum laude’ and conducted postdoctoral studies at Yale University.

Dr. Jun Xu joined LLS in 2011. LLS Therapy Acceleration Program (TAP) seeks to fund clinical development of therapies or diagnostics that have the potential to change the standard of care for patients with blood cancer, especially in areas of high unmet medical need.  Dr. Xu has reviewed several hundred funding requests to select the best ones to be supported by LLS, among them Stemline, Kite and Forty Seven. She also serves as Research Advisory Committee Member for a diverse LLS TAP alliance portfolio.

Prior to joining LLS Dr. Xu spent more than 16 years working in healthcare industry including more than a decade at Pfizer. She had successfully led multiple projects in Oncology and Immunology from target validation to clinical development. Dr. Xu has broad and in-depth experience in drug discovery and development, especially in oncology and inflammation therapeutic areas. Dr. Xu has published in peer reviewed journals including Nature and is the lead inventor for several patents. Dr. Xu received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego and conducted her postdoc research at the California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Blaine Robinson joined LLS in 2011 and was recently promoted in April 2019 to Executive Director for the Therapy Acceleration Program (TAP), the venture philanthropy initiative of LLS. He works closely with the entire LLS Research team and is responsible for identifying and evaluating potential blood cancer drug development opportunities for investment. He has over 15 years of research, drug development and project management experience in the blood cancer field. During his tenure at LLS, he has managed over 20 TAP partnerships and has helped perform scientific due diligence on hundreds of opportunities for TAP.

Prior to LLS, Dr. Robinson worked at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where he completed a two year postdoctoral fellowship and continued on as a Research Associate for five years where he was in charge of all research laboratory operations and project management duties in a pediatric leukemia laboratory. He received his Ph.D. degree in Pharmacology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI following a successful undergraduate research experience at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA where he simultaneously received a dual B.S./M.S. degree in chemistry.