Jason Luke

Jason Luke is a physician-scientist-executive and the Chief Medical Officer of Strand Therapeutics, where he leads clinical development and medical affairs. Strand is developing field-leading programmable mRNA medicines to address high unmet needs, initially focused on cancer. The lead program STX-001 is a lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-encapsulated self-replicating (rep) mRNA that activates innate immunity, promotes immunogenic cancer cell death, and expresses IL-12 to induce immune responses against tumors. As disclosed at ASCO 2025, intratumoral STX-001 has demonstrated systemic anti-tumor responses in patients with refractory cancer, especially melanoma. Subsequent Strand programs include STX-003, an IV administered LNP-repRNA-IL-12 with genetic circuits to optimize therapeutic index, and STX-005, a circular RNA platform for in vivo CAR-T and non-oncology indications. Prior to joining Strand, Jason was an academic and administrative leader as faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and Associate Director for Clinical Research of the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. There he oversaw enterprise scale research, providing physician leadership of ~800 clinical trials and associated infrastructure budget. On a scientific level, Jason was Principal Investigator of >100 clinical trials from Phase I-IV, including global PI for registrational studies in melanoma. As an early phase investigator, he led first-in-human clinical trials of nearly all categories of novel cancer therapeutics including but not limited to immune-checkpoint inhibitors, bispecific antibodies, innate immunity, oncolytic virus, gene transfer and adoptive cell transfer as well as RNA therapeutics, kinase inhibitors, antibody drug conjugates, molecular glues and more. His immuno-genomics focused translational research laboratory was funded by the NIH, DOD and other sources. He has been a retained scientific advisory board member to >25 biotechnology and served as scientific consultant to >60 pharma or biotech companies. He received his MD from Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science/Chicago Medical School and thereafter completed internal medicine residency at Boston University Medical Center as well as medical oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He additionally held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as well as the University of Chicago.