Coriell Board of Trustees
Matthew Hewitt, PhD, currently serves as the Senior Director, Scientific Solutions Cell & Gene Therapy (CGT) at Charles River Laboratories (CRL). In this role Matt leads one of CRL's CGT sites in helping multiple partners move CGT assets to clinic and commercial markets. Matt is also responsible for leading many conversations on CRL's strategic approach to cell and gene therapy.
Prior to joining CRL, Matt was Head of Clinical Development for Lonza’s Personalized Medicine (PerMed) Business Unit where he was responsible for the Cocoon Platform, a closed, automated, scalable cell therapy manufacturing solution which relieves many cell therapy manufacturing difficulties. Matt also oversaw numerous academic and industry collaborations in his time at Lonza to accelerate CGT clinical development timelines, this included a lead program in Israel which culminated in dosing the 1st patient with a cell therapy manufactured in the Cocoon. He led the R&D Innovation group for a time which included launching the Personalized Medicine Scientific Advisory Board, to aid in directing current and future personalized medicine activities, and launched a personalized medicine analytics initiative to better understand cell therapy products and provide deeper insight to enhance clinical efficacy and manufacturing process robustness.
Prior to joining Lonza, Matt led the Tumor Immunology and Microenvironment program at Bellicum Pharmaceuticals which focused on improving cell therapy efficacy in solid tumors. Matt led the Immunology group at the University of Pennsylvania’s Gene Therapy Program under Dr. James Wilson leading numerous AAV gene therapy programs.
Matt received his PhD. in Biophysics & Physiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and completed his post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.
