Ryan Hicks is a Senior Director and Head of Bioscience Cell Therapy, within the Cell Therapy Department of BioPharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca. Ryan is responsible for leading the section driving the discovery and development of cell therapy-based projects, primarily in the pre-clinical phase, across cardiovascular, renal, metabolic, respiratory, and immunological disease areas. Ryan’s scientific background is in cellular and molecular biology and has over two decades of drug discovery and development experience. Throughout his career, Ryan has led people and projects across multiple disease areas, geographies and therapeutic modalities, including Small Molecules, Antibodies, Therapeutic Genome Editing, Oligonucleotide Therapies and Cell Therapy.

In addition to internal projects, Ryan has led multiple external collaborations with industrial and academic partners, contributed to multiple successful grant applications, supervised several Postdoc and Ph.D scientists and has over 30 peer reviewed publications.

Ryan joined AstraZeneca in 2001 and prior to joining AstraZeneca, Ryan was a Postdoc at Leeds University, receiving his degree in Medical Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham, UK in 1997 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Leeds, UK, in 2001