Marcos is a Venture Partner at Samsara BioCapital. He has experience in drug discovery across the areas of autoimmunity and inflammation, neurosciences and pain, and immuno-oncology. His training and expertise encompass the fields of biochemistry, biophysics, molecular pharmacology, cell & molecular biology, and structural biology. He has previously directed efforts focused on multiple intracellular and extracellular target classes, including cell surface and nuclear receptors, presented antigens, ion channels, kinases and proteinases. That led to the discovery and development of break-through lead series of small and large molecule modulators of those target classes, as well as engineered T cells targeting presented antigens.
Marcos graduated with a BS degree from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Lima, Peru) in 1985, and a PhD degree in Cell & Molecular Biology from Saint Louis University in 1990. He did post-doctoral training at MIT as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow (1990- 1993), and at Duke (1993-1995).
Marcos was the Chief Scientific Officer of Synthorx from 2017 until its acquisition by Sanofi in January of 2020, when he became its Head. Previous to that, he held industry and faculty appointments at GlaxoSmithKline (1995-1998), the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania (1998-2005), Roche Palo Alto (2005-2009), Janssen R&D (2009-2106), and Adaptive Biotechnologies (2016-2017). Since 2018, he also holds an Adjunct Faculty appointment at the Skaags School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences of UCSD.