Cancer, immunology, systems biology, COVID-19

Dr. James R. Heath is President and Professor at Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Heath also has the position of Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. Formerly, he was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, and served as co-director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at UCLA until 2017.

Heath has had a profound impact on ISB since taking over leadership in 2018. He continues to make important discoveries in the field of cancer immunotherapy, and in 2022 was selected to lead a National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center to study sequential targeted inhibitors and immunotherapies.  

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Heath quickly pivoted the focus of his lab and collaboratively worked with others within and beyond ISB to uncover secrets behind COVID-19 and long COVID. He published research that has changed how COVID-19 is understood, and now leads the Pacific Northwest consortium of the NIH-funded RECOVER study, which aims to understand the long-term effects of COVID.

Heath received his PhD in 1988 from Rice University, where he was the principal graduate student involved in the discovery of C60 and the fullerenes. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley before joining the research staff at IBM Watson Labs in 1991. He took a faculty position at UCLA in 1994, and moved to Caltech in 2003.

He has received several awards and honors, including the Irving Weinstein Award from the American Association of Cancer Researchers, and the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences. In 2009, he was named one of the top seven innovators in the world by Forbes Magazine.

Heath has founded or co-founded several companies, including PACT Pharma, Integrated Diagnostics, Indi Molecular, CTI Molecular Imaging (acquired by Siemens in 2005), Sofie Biosciences, Isoplexis, and NanoSys.