B. Matija Peterlin is one of the co-founders at KOSMAS Therapeutics. As a Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California San Francisco, he has extensive expertise in immunology and clinical medicine, with an emphasis on chronic autoimmune diseases and cancer. For these conditions, he wants to develop new immunotherapies.

As a clinical fellow at Stanford, he studied basic immune responses in people and their genetic bases. They led to the elucidation of congenital immunodeficiencies and how immune response genes are transcribed. Studying HIV, then an emerging disease, he discovered a new and universal mechanism of gene expression. Indeed, dysregulation of transcriptional elongation contribute to cancer, senescence, T cell anergy and exhaustion. Of interest, translocations into genes that regulate this process lead to leukemia. For his work, Dr. Peterlin received fellowships from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, American Cancer Society, memberships in the American Society for Clinical Investigation, American Association of Physicians and the Humboldt Prize. For 20 years, he was also an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Peterlin received his BS in Chemistry and Physics from Duke University and MD from Harvard Medical School. He received his research and clinical training at the NIH and Stanford University.