John Gray is the Senior Vice President of Genetic Therapies Research at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. He has served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Audentes Therapeutics since December 2015 and prior to that was Vice President, Research and Development since July 2014. Dr. Gray has over 20 years of experience designing genetic therapies and vaccines, and developing manufacturing processes for those products. For 11 years prior to joining Audentes, Dr. Gray was the Director of Vector Production and Development at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital where he led a team devoted to advancing the gene therapy vector science. In the area of lentiviral vector production, his team derived the GPRG stable cell line, the first such line to be used to successfully produce an HIV-based vector tested in a human clinical trial (for treatment of X-linked Severe Combined Immunodeficiency). He also contributed significantly to the Hemophilia B gene therapy project, for which he designed the self-complementary AAV Factor IX vector expression cassette and developed the production process used to manufacture the first two batches of clinical vector. During his tenure at St. Jude, Dr. Gray also worked on Chimeric Antigen Receptor modified cell therapy, lysosomal storage disorder gene therapy, and multiple hematopoietic stem/progenitor cell gene therapy projects. Prior to joining St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 2003, Dr. Gray was a researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Mulligan, where for 5 years he served as the Assistant Director of the Harvard Gene Therapy Initiative. Prior to this he worked for 5 years at Pfizer Animal Health designing bacterial and viral vectors for vaccine applications. Dr. Gray has a B.A. degree in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder.