Dr Steve Coats | Vice President R&D
AstraZeneca Early Oncology

Steve Coats serves as AstraZeneca/MedImmune’s VP R&D and Product Development Team Leader. His work focuses on interacting with external investigators to initiate clinical trials that are investigator led at academic institutes. Dr. Coats is also a product development team leader where he leads oncology project teams in early phase 1 and phase II clinical development for MedImmune’s antibody drug conjugates and immune-oncology programs.
 
Prior to joining MedImmune in 2005, Dr. Coats worked at Amgen, Inc. starting in 1996 and helped initially set up a cell cycle group and then became one of the first scientists in the newly formed cancer biology department.
 
Dr. Coats earned his bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of New Hampshire in 1985. Following his undergraduate degree, he worked as a research assistant for three years in the pulmonary department at Beth Israel Hospital and Children’s Hospital in Boston. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular and cell Biology in 1993 Vanderbilt University’s Department of Cell Biology. The focus of his graduate work was on the role that PDGF receptors and ligands play in regulating signal transduction pathways and the cell cycle. He continued his cell cycle research during his post-doctoral work from 1993-1996 at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. While at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center he investigated the role that cyclin-CDK complexes play in regulating G1/S and G2/M transition points and he focused much of his research on examining the regulation of the cell cycle by the CDK inhibitor p27Kip1.