W. Nicholas Haining, B.M., B.Ch. is the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences, a clinical-stage cell therapy company based in South San Francisco. ArsenalBio uses genome engineering, synthetic biology and machine learning to engineer T cell therapies for cancer. 

A physician-scientist, immunologist and drug developer, he received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Oxford University, UK. He subsequently completed his medical training in Pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital and in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

As an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, his lab defined some of the key transcriptional and epigenetic regulators of T cell exhaustion and used in vivo genetic screens to identify immune vulnerabilities of cancer cells. His clinical expertise is in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and he attended on the bone marrow transplant service at Boston Children’s Hospital for almost twenty years.

More recently, he served as Vice-President, Discovery Oncology and Immunology at Merck Research Laboratories, where he led a multi-site, multidisciplinary team developing innovative approaches to identify therapies for cancer and immune diseases.