Dr. Sophie Papa

Dr Papa is the Chief Medical Officer and Head of Translational Science at Enara Bio. Enara is a biotech based in Oxford, UK, focused on the discovery of novel, shared, targets in the epigenetically derepressed ‘Dark Genome’. Enara’s thesis is that cancer immunotherapy requires novel target discovery to bring therapeutic potential to a wider patient population. Sophie has built a career as a clinical academic at the forefront of cancer immunotherapy over the past 22 years. She has over 17 years of experience in medical oncology and, prior to joining Enara, she was a Consultant Medical Oncologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTFT). Sophie specialised in malignant melanoma and Merkle cell carcinoma. She has extensive clinical trial experience as a principal investigator in the GSTFT early phase trials team and through delivery of academic and industry sponsored clinical trials from phase 1-4. Central to this was Sophie’s leadership of the solid tumour cell therapy clinical trial portfolio at GSTFT as program lead for cell therapy.

Sophie is a Clinical Reader in Immune Oncology at King’s College London with a laboratory focused on translational cell therapy and checkpoint inhibitor research. Sophie completed her pre-clinical medical training in 1998 at the University of Oxford, her clinical medical training at Imperial College London in 2001 and a PhD in CAR T cell therapy for prostate cancer from King’s College London in 2011.  She was awarded an MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship in 2014 to develop solid tumour cell therapy and became a Fellow of The Royal College of Physicians, London in 2019. 

Sophie has advised multiple biotech’s on clinical translation and trial design as well as working with pharmaceutical companies as a key opinion leader in cancer immunotherapy. She has published over 50 academic papers in the field.