Stephen T. Isaacs is a member of the Center for Global Development's Board of Directors.
Stephen T. Isaacs founded Aduro Biotech and served as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer from 2008 to 2020. Aduro was a publicly traded clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on immuno-oncology, with additional programs in autoimmunity and infectious disease (now Chinook Therapeutics). Prior to Aduro, Mr. Isaacs founded Cerus Corporation where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer from 1991 to 2004. Cerus is a biomedical products company that developed and commercialized the Intercept Blood Systems that are globally available and used to prevent a variety of diseases from blood transfusion. Mr. Isaacs also held a non-teaching faculty position in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley from 1978 to 1986, where he published over 20 peer-reviewed scientific articles and was an inventor on over 40 issued patents. In addition to leading multiple biotechnology companies, Mr. Isaacs spends considerable time on the African continent working on various non-profit activities. With his family, he founded “A Better Education” (ABE) Club, which provides educational opportunities, microfinance training and healthcare for remote villagers in the south of Kenya. More recently, he founded the Alliance for Global Health and Science with the Department of Public Health at UC Berkeley, which undertakes capacity building at universities and medical schools in Uganda and Zimbabwe. He also established the Immunotherapeutics and Vaccine Research Initiative at UC Berkeley, which is a campus-wide organization to promote immunological research for cancer and infectious disease. Mr. Isaacs serves as a Trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation and the Blum Center for Developing Economies and is on the Board of the Center for Global Development and several private companies. Mr. Isaacs holds an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, where he also pursued Ph.D. studies in organic chemistry.
