Kevin Parker, Ph.D., is the CEO of Cartography Biosciences, a company he co-founded in 2020 to build smarter roadmaps for drug discovery that would expand the number of safe and effective targets for cancer therapies.
Parker earned his Bachelor of Arts in human developmental and regenerative biology from Harvard University before completing his doctorate at Stanford University, where he worked at the intersection of genomics, immunology and computational biology.
Building on an idea formed during his doctorate work and recognizing that most candidates for new cancer drugs focus on a small group of targets, Parker combined a deep understanding of advances in single-cell sequencing and a proprietary machine learning platform to create atlases that map the human body at the cellular level. This resulted in Cartography’s ATLAS and SUMMIT platforms, which are powered by an industry-leading, fully integrated dataset spanning hundreds of thousands of cell states and large-scale profiling of tumor cells. Under Parker’s leadership, the company is advancing its lead program, CBI-1214, a highly potent T‑cell engager directed at LY6G6D, a next-generation antigen with strong promise for colorectal cancer patients.
Cartography’s platform led to a collaboration with Gilead Sciences, which expands Cartography’s reach into triple-negative breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer and validates the company’s platform for precision oncology.
Through his work, Parker is not only shaping Cartography’s future but also challenging the broader industry to embrace bold, data-driven approaches that have the potential to shorten timelines, reduce costs and lead to more effective medicines.