Dr. James Patterson is an entrepreneurial physician-scientist who has built his career bridging the gap from on-paper invention to biotech-level execution. He is focused on innovating and uncovering rare ideas with the potential to become great medicines, partnering with founders and portfolio companies to implement practical research strategies that translate ambitious scientific hypotheses into therapeutic realities.

James started his entrepreneurial journey by founding Auxolytic around a novel cell-therapy safety switch and advancing it to in vivo proof of concept with Stanford collaborators before licensing the technology to a publicly traded biotech following its publication in Nature Biotechnology.

He later imagined and built an iPSC-derived, in vivo gene-therapy platform that led to the establishment of Xap Therapeutics, which he co-founded with investment from SR One and Amplitude Ventures. As Head of Discovery Research at Xap, James established and scaled the R&D organization, recruited senior leadership, secured multiple granted U.S. patents, and advanced programs toward therapeutic proof of concept.

James has advised several leading venture firms through scientific and technical diligence. Active in supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs, he supervised Biochemistry at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, lectured on gene therapies and CRISPR for the NHS Genomics Education Program, and taught entrepreneurship at the Judge Business School.

He achieved a double first in Medicine and Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, earning prizes for his final-year examination results. His early research included work at the University of Zurich, the Wellcome Trust Gurdon Institute, and the Whitehead Institute, spanning imaging-based transcriptomics, miRNA biology, cancer stem cells, and iPSC reprogramming. He went on to complete an MD/PhD at the Francis Crick Institute with Sir Paul Nurse and Prof. Charles Swanton as a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds fellow, developing chemogenetic approaches that uncovered novel mechanisms of cell-size control — research that was recognized with multiple publications and awards. Alongside clinical training at UCL, he pursued postdoctoral work in deep learning.

‍