Dr. John Bell is one of Canada’s foremost immunotherapy researchers and a pioneer in harnessing the immune system to fight cancer. A professor of medicine at uOttawa and senior scientist with the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, he is also co-founder of Turnstone Biologics, which has raised more than $340 million in investment and has $2 billion in licencing agreements. During the pandemic, he applied his decades of work on cancer-fighting viruses to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.
Dr. Bell earned a PhD at McMaster University. He is a member of the Center for Cancer Therapeutics at The Ottawa Hospital Cancer Center and heads the Canadian Oncolytic Virus Consortium. He is scientific director of the National Centre of Excellence for the Development of Biotherapeutics for Cancer Therapy, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.