Irv Weissman (Norbert von der Groeben for Stanford)
Stanford stem cell pioneer nets $194M from Gilead-Forty Seven buyout
Gilead’s $4.9 billion buyout of Forty Seven, their largest in three years, brought with it a substantial windfall for the biotech’s founder, CEO and earliest investor.
Chief among those winners was Irv Weissman, a well-known stem cell pioneer at Stanford. Weissman and colleague Ravindra Majeti founded the company out of Stanford in 2016, after their early studies showed that some cancer cells use CD47 — healthy cells’ “don’t eat me” signal to the immune system — to evade attack and that you could treat those cancers by blocking the signal.
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