Dr. Foley is Director of In Vivo Pharmacology at Synta Pharmaceuticals Corp., a Boston-area biotechnology company, where his research focuses on the discovery and preclinical development of small molecule drugs for the treatment of cancer, diabetes and autoimmune disorders.

Prior to this, as a Senior Scientist at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, his group employed mouse genetics for the in vivo validation of genomically derived drug targets and to develop improved models of human disease. As a Staff Scientist at ZymoGenetics, he developed a new mouse model of the autoimmune disease, systemic lupus erythematosus. This work implicated the B cell cytokine BLyS (BAFF) as a key player in B cell-mediated autoimmunity, and a BLyS antagonist, Atacicept, is now in Phase 2 clinical trials.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Foley studied the function of the Myc proto-oncogene network with Drs. Robert N. Eisenman and Philippe Soriano at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He received his Ph.D. in Dr. J. Douglas Engel’s laboratory at Northwestern University (now at University of Michigan), where he studied the transcriptional regulation of hemoglobin switching during development.