Romuald Corbau, Ph.D.

Romuald Corbau, Ph.D., is Chief Scientific Officer at Capsida Biotherapeutics. Dr. Corbau has over 27 years of experience in gene therapy and drug discovery across startups and global organizations in the United States and Europe. Prior to Capsida, Dr. Corbau served as Chief Scientific Officer at Adverum Biotechnologies (acquired by Eli Lilly), where he led second- and third-generation ixo-vec programs and broader ocular pipeline expansion. Before Adverum, he was Chief Scientific Officer at GenEdit (now BreezeBio) and, prior to that, at Freeline Therapeutics (now Spur Therapeutics), where he built the research organization from 8 to 42 FTEs, advanced AAV programs for hemophilia B and Fabry disease into the clinic, and initiated and championed the Gaucher disease program — now in Phase 3 as avigbagene parvec (FLT201), with the same cassette being developed for Parkinson’s disease associated with GBA mutations. Earlier in his career, Dr. Corbau was Translational Lead at Spark Therapeutics, supporting the clinical development of Luxturna — the first FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited disease — with a concurrent appointment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He previously served as Director and Head of Biology at CISTIM (the Centre for Innovation and Stimulation of Drug Discovery) in Belgium, and spent 13 years at Pfizer in the United Kingdom, where he initiated Pfizer’s first gene therapy program and contributed to the discovery of lersivirine. Dr. Corbau earned his Master’s in Biochemistry from the University of Lille and his DEA from the Pasteur Institute of Lille, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Lille, with thesis research conducted at INSERM Unit 375 within the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.