Dr. Craig Blanchette, PhD

Craig Blanchette has over 20 years’ experience in drug discovery and development. He spent 10 years at Lawrence Livermore laboratory working on RNA and protein therapeutics discovery in combination with nanoparticle delivery technology for drug discovery in infectious diseases. After LLNL, Craig moved to Genentech and joined an antibody and protein therapeutic drug discovery group supporting multiple therapeutic areas. Craig also played an important role in building out the genetic medicine strategy at Genentech, which included RNAi, mRNA and gene therapy. He became Senior Director of a newly emerging protein therapeutics and genetic medicine drug discovery group and played a pivotal role in defining the therapeutic strategy for these new modalities. In 2023, Craig took a role at Switch therapeutics as SVP and head of the Research organization and he has played a critical role in developing the drug discovery and target selection strategy for this novel RNAi therapeutic modality.