Matt Kennedy, PhD

Matt Kennedy is the SVP and Head of Plat­form at Serif, where he leads the devel­op­ment and opti­miza­tion of the company’s biotech­nol­o­gy plat­form. His work focus­es on inte­grat­ing sci­en­tif­ic inno­va­tion with scal­able tech­nol­o­gy, ensur­ing that Serif remains at the fore­front of nov­el nucle­ic acid med­i­cine devel­op­ment. With a strong back­ground in bio­chem­istry, virol­o­gy, and RNA biol­o­gy, Matt lever­ages his exper­tise to dri­ve inno­va­tion across the team.

Pri­or to Serif, Matt was at Oncorus, where he was dri­ving con­cepts to IND for oncolyt­ic virus­es and nov­el LNP deliv­ery, repli­cat­ing RNA ther­a­peu­tics for treat­ment of sol­id tumors. While there he rose from Senior Sci­en­tist to VP Head of Research. Specif­i­cal­ly, he led devel­op­ment of their syn­thet­ic virus plat­form which cul­mi­nat­ed in two drug can­di­dates and one IND for this first in class modal­i­ty, and cell-type spe­cif­ic miR­NA atten­u­a­tion strate­gies that pro­gressed from con­cept into the clinic.

Matt received his PhD from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester, com­plet­ed a post­doc­tor­al fel­low­ship at Duke, has over 80 pub­li­ca­tions and patents, and has a track record of dri­ving val­ue by lead­ing teams to inno­vate in response to dif­fi­cult sci­en­tif­ic problems.