Katherine High, MD

Dr. Katherine High trained in internal medicine, hematology, and molecular genetics. Her pioneering bench-to-bedside studies of gene therapy for hemophilia led to a series of basic and clinical investigations that characterized the human immune response to AAV gene delivery vectors. Her work evolved to encompass clinical translation of genetic therapies for multiple inherited disorders, and as the inaugural director of a Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where she was also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Dr. High assembled a multidisciplinary team of scientists and physicians to discover and develop new gene therapies for genetic diseases. In 2013, her center at CHOP spun out as Spark Therapeutics, where she led the team that achieved the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of a gene therapy for a genetic disease. She was a member of the faculty at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 2014. She is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and holds multiple patents in gene therapy. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians (London). She is currently president of Therapeutics at Asklepios BioPharmaceuticals (AskBio), a subsidiary of Bayer.