Manfred Kraus PhD

VP, Head of R&D Therapeutics

Manfred has focused on oncology/immuno-oncology during his career and enjoyed leading multi-disciplinary drug discovery projects with different target and treatment modalities (kinase, metabolic, epigenetic modulators with small/large molecule, antisense modalities).

Prior to joining Kernal Bio, he was Scientific Senior Director at the Tumor Microenvironment Thematic Research Center at BMS. Before BMS, Dr. Kraus was a Director at Pfizer’s Oncology Research Unit where he led the in vivo pharmacology teams supporting the oncology portfolio from new target identification to clinical proof of concept. Previously, Manfred worked in the oncology departments at Astra-Zeneca, Merck & Co., and Serono.

Manfred earned his Ph.D. in immunology with Dr. Klaus Rajewsky at the University of Cologne in Germany, followed by post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School investigating the role of B cell receptor signaling in mature B lymphocytes. Manfred’s scientific accomplishments include the discovery of the tonic BCR-mediated survival signal in mature B cells. He pushed our understanding of the role of ITAM and non-ITAM phosphorylation in the CD79a/b signaling subunit of the B cell receptor plus advanced and mentored technical innovation such as conditional gene-targeting, reversible RNAi in mice and multi-parametric flow cytometry.

He is an author on 27 peer-reviewed articles and an inventor on 4 patents.