講演者

Currently a scientist in analytical development at Sangamo Therapeutics. Molecular and cell biologist working in gene and cell therapy development.

• Biophysical Methods

After completing her PhD in Biochemistry from the Cellular and Molecular Biology in India Dr. Priyamvada Acharya first held a visiting scientist appointment jointly at the Max Planck Institutes of Biophysics in Frankfurt and Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, where she worked on the structural biology of bacterial methanogenesis pathways, and next, at the Vaccine Research Center at NIH, USA, in the laboratory of Peter Kwong, she worked on the structural biology of HIV-1 entry. At Duke University, Dr. Acharya is the Director of the Division of Structural Biology at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, and an Associate Professor in the Departments of Surgery and Biochemistry. Dr. Acharya’s research is focused on understanding the structural basis of viral entry and applying the knowledge gained for vaccines and therapeutics development.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Chloe Ackaert is a pharmacist by training (Catholic University of Leuven 2009) and obtained her PhD at the University of Salzburg (Austria) for the research on the impact of nitration on the immunogenicity of birch pollen allergens in 2013. She first joined ImmunXperts in the start-up phase and continued academic research at the Free University of Brussels (2015-2018) working on the immunogenicity of Nanobodies. Afterwards, she joined ImmunXperts again where she is a senior scientist in the immunogenicity team, collaborating both on the client-based projects as well as on the continuous basic research projects to elucidate immunogenicity-related questions.

• TS7A: Introduction to Immunogenicity

Dr. Adams is Chief Scientific Officer of Elucida Oncology, a clinical stage company developing antibody-toxin fusion proteins for the treatment of cancer. In this role he is responsible for guiding the development of the company’s pipeline assets. Before moving to biotech, Dr. Adams was the Director of Biological Research and Therapeutics and previously co-led the Developmental Therapeutics Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, an NCI designated comprehensive cancer center in Philadelphia. Dr. Adams is an immunologist with over 30 years of experience in developing antibody-based agents for the treatment and detection of cancer. He received a Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of California at Davis in 1991. He joined Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia where he led a laboratory focused on developing antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates for the treatment of breast, ovarian and renal cancer. Dr. Adams serves on the Editorial Boards of Cancer Immunology Research, MAbs and Cancer Biotherapy & Radiopharmaceuticals. He has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of a number of biotechnology companies including Endo Pharmaceuticals, Symphogen, Avipep, Viventia Bio, AvidBiologics, Xerion, Fabrus, Integral Molecular and YM Biosciences.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Bruce joined 10x Genomics in 2018 as part of the Cell Biology Department where he has primarily worked on 10x's 5' Single Cell Immune Profiling portfolio. He did his doctoral training in Biology at the University of Victoria (BC, Canada), and his postdoctoral training at UCSF's Diabetes Center and the Institute for Regeneration Medicine.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Dr. Adams has over 18 years of experience in oncology biomarker/translational research, of which the last eight were dedicated to pharmaceutical drug development as a translational medicine lead. His work has focused on establishing strategies to better understand clinical drug activity, mechanisms of action and identification of response/resistance biomarkers. Findings from his work in asymptomatic malignancies as well as advanced stage hematological and solid (non-CNS) tumors have led to multiple national and international presentations, publications and drug approvals. Dr. Adams has complemented early- and late-stage clinical trial development with advocacy for accrual and retention of diverse clinical trial populations and corporate social responsibility activities. In Dr. Adams' current role, he serves as the global translational medicine lead for GEN1042, a Duobody® bispecifc targeting CD40 and 41BB, for the treatment of advanced solid tumors.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Nicholas Agard is a Principal Scientist in the Department of Antibody Engineering at Genentech, Inc. His research interests focus on advancing new antibody formats and conjugates to develop the next-generation of therapeutic agonists. Prior to Genentech, Nicholas spent time at Codexis exploring the directed evolution of therapeutic enzymes and conducted postdoctoral and graduate studies at UC Berkeley and UCSF.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Haig Aghajanian, PhD is Co-Founder, Vice President, and Head of Research at Capstan Therapeutics, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Pennsylvania, he authored several high-impact publications including a first-author publication in Nature using CAR T cells against cardiac fibrosis and a senior-author publication in Science using targeted lipid nanoparticles to reprogram immune cells in vivo. He received his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

To be added

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Rich Altman has 30 years of experience in protein expression and production. In early 2019, he joined Thermo Fisher Scientific as a Field Application Scientist. Previously, he worked for several pharmaceutical companies, including Amgen, Alexion, Bayer, and Upjohn, on the cloning, expression, purification and characterization of recombinant proteins. This work supported both small-molecule high-throughput screening and protein therapeutic efforts. He received his MS degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows
• Optimizing Protein Expression
• SC7: Use and Troubleshooting of Eukaryotic Expression Systems

Dr. Zhiqiang An is Professor of Molecular Medicine, the Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry, and Director of the Texas Therapeutics Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. His laboratory focuses on cancer antibody drug resistance mechanisms, biomarkers for cancer therapeutic antibodies, and antibody drug discovery targeting human diseases. Dr. An also directs the Therapeutic Monoclonal Antibody Lead Optimization and Development Core Facility funded by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). Previously, he served as Chief Scientific Officer at Epitomics, Inc. and was Director of Biologics Research at Merck Research Laboratories. He started his biotech career at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Dr. An received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Kentucky and his postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. An is well published in the field of antibody drug discovery including the award-winning book “Therapeutic Monoclonal Antibodies: from Bench to Clinic”. He started his biotech career at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. He is an elected fellow of Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB), an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (ASM), an elected fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

• SC1: Antibody Drug Discovery: From Target to Lead

Andrew Anzalone is head of the prime editing platform at Prime Medicine, where he currently leads efforts to advance prime editing technologies for human therapeutic applications. Prior to joining Prime Medicine, Dr. Anzalone was a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of David R. Liu at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In the Liu laboratory, Dr. Anzalone pioneered the development of prime editing, a novel search-and-replace gene editing technology that has the potential to correct the large fraction of known human genetic variants associated with disease. He completed his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Columbia University, where his thesis research in Virginia W. Cornish’s laboratory focused on chemical biology and synthetic biology. He received his Sc.B. degree in chemistry from Brown University, where he performed undergraduate research in synthetic organic chemistry.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic
• Cell-Based Immunotherapies
• Optimizing Protein Expression
• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond
• mRNA Therapeutics
• Biophysical Methods
• Engineering Antibodies
• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Vicky Appleman has extensive experience in cancer biology and immuno-oncology, and is currently the discovery research lead for Takeda Oncology's STING agonist programs. Vicky received her PhD from the UMass Chan Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and pursued interests in KRAS, EGFR, and other key tumor cell signaling pathways before extending into immuno-oncology as a postdoctoral researcher. As a principal scientist at Takeda Oncology, she is currently most interested in understanding how targeted STING pathway activation can provide the most benefit to cancer patients.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Dennis works as a scientist and project manager in early drug discovery and his main research interests are protein biophysics and characterization, antibody discovery, and protein stability. Before joining the biophysics department, he worked for four years with characterization of chemical stability of peptide and protein, also at Novo Nordisk. He holds a PhD from Karlstad University, Sweden, within pharmaceutical analysis of small molecules and which was a collaboration with AstraZeneca R&D, Gothenburg.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Husain Attarwala is a clinical pharmacologist, pharmacometrician, and researcher in drug development. Currently, he is serving as Vice President of DMPK and Clinical Pharmacology at Stealth NewCo. Prior to this, he was Head of Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacometrics at Moderna. His research focuses on developing predictive models to guide clinical dose decisions for mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. Prior to joining Moderna, Husain was a Principal Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, where his research helped guide dose selection for various novel siRNA therapeutics, 5 of which have received global regulatory approvals. He has obtained PhD and MS degrees in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Drug Delivery Systems from Northeastern University, and a Bachelor in Pharmacy from Al-Ameen College of Pharmacy.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Travis Bainbridge is a scientist (4) and molecule lead in Large Molecule Drug Discovery at Genentech. Originally trained as molecular virologist at Purdue University and University of Florida, Travis now supports the discovery of large molecule therapeutics through all stages of research and transition to early development, with a focus on protein engineering and design.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Ms. Barman has over 13 years of experience in molecular biology, expression and protein engineering. She has extensive hands-on experience in early research and development of therapeutic antibodies at Pfizer and BMS. As Sr. Field Application Scientist with GenScript’s Life Sciences Group, her primary focus is on protein and antibody portfolio. Ms. Barman holds a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology and Microbiology.

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows

Multidisciplinary bench scientist having worked in various roles and companies, from isolating rare and underrepresented cancers at the Broad Institute to automating cell-based toxicology assays in a CRO setting.

Prior to shifting to IDBS, Michael spent ~3 years in Pfizer’s BioProcess R&D Cell Line Development group, working to evaluate different vectors/expression systems and investigate phenotypic changes at a genotypic level.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an AI faculty lead for Jameel Clinic, an MIT center for Machine Learning in Health. Her research interests are in applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology. She is a recipient of various awards including the NSF Career Award, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship and several Best Paper Awards at NAACL and ACL. In 2017, she received a MacArthur fellowship, an ACL fellowship and an AAAI fellowship. In 2021, she was awarded the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, the AACC Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Award, and the UNESCO/Netexplo Award. In 20222, Regina was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University, and spent a year as a postdoc at Cornell University. Prof. Barzilay received her undergraduate degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Nathan received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Washington State University in 2013. During this time, he conducted research on novel small molecule inhibitors of prostate specific membrane antigen under Dr. Cliff Berkman. In 2014 he entered the Integrated Life Sciences graduate program at The University of Georgia before matriculating into the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology where he would earn his PhD under Dr. Zachary Wood. During his graduate work he used X-ray crystallography and kinetic analysis to study the allosteric regulation and hysteresis mechanisms of human UDP-glucose dehydrogenase. After a brief postdoc in the Wood lab, Nathan joined Amgen as a scientist in Discovery Protein Science. At Amgen, Nathan’s work focuses on expressing and purifying difficult proteins using non-mammalian systems. The scope of his work typically includes E3 ligases, transcription factors, and other targets of therapeutic interest.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

No bio available.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Len Blackwell is an Associate Director at Biogen who leads the Analytical Development - Strategic Analytics group which brings digitization and efficiency to laboratories through automated processes including robotics, data processing, and data analytics. Len is passionate about revolutionizing the way laboratory work is done in the pharmaceutical space. He received his PhD in Biochemistry at New York University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Paul Modrich at Duke University, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize for his lifetime achievements in DNA mismatch repair.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Dr. Blum is the director of the Bioexpression and Fermentation Facility (BFF). Dr. Blum received his Bachelor of Science and PhD degrees in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Georgia. His graduate research under the direction of Dr. Lars G. Ljungdahl focused on biochemical and genetic characterization of enzymes involved in the degradation of plant cell walls. After graduation, Dr. Blum joined Diversa Corporation where he continued his research on discovery and characterization of biomass degrading enzymes. While at Diversa, he was responsible for the direction of several sponsored research programs including one project concept that was awarded Phase I and Phase II SBIR funding from the Department of Energy. In addition, he was the original project manager leading research that resulted in the development of Diversa’s Luminase product line. After leaving Diversa, Dr. Blum joined Vanderbilt University Medical Center where his research focused on mammalian protein expression and antibody discovery. His research at Vanderbilt utilized a novel technology that generates monoclonal antibodies from human peripheral blood. Since joining UGA, he has led an interdisciplinary team that over the past 10 years has completed over 1200 projects including 4000 fermentations and hundreds of purifications for academic and industry clients. Dr. Blum has coauthored 15 peer-reviewed articles and has presented his work at national and international scientific meetings.

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows

Sara obtained her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she focused on and gained expertise in membrane proteins. She is currently a scientist at Salipro Biotech, a company headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden with a proprietary platform enabling drug discovery against challenging drug targets.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Adrian Bot, MD, PhD, CSO, Executive Vice President, R&D, Capstan Therapeutics

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy
• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies
• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics
• Cell-Based Immunotherapies
• Difficult-to-Express Proteins
• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety
• Display of Biologics

Dr. Myriam Bouchlaka, PhD, is Director of Research, Immuno-Oncology at OncoResponse, Inc. Prior to joining OncoResponse in 2019, Dr. Bouchlaka, was a Senior Scientist at Arch Oncology where she led the in vivo pharmacology group and characterized anti-CD47 antibodies checkpoint inhibitors from discovery to the clinical stage. Dr. Bouchlaka completed her postdoctoral research in Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the laboratory of Dr. Christian Capitini. Her postdoctoral training focused on translational research developing adoptive cell therapies (NK and CAR T cell) and imagining techniques to monitor cell trafficking post-infusion with goal to improve usage of cellular therapies for pediatric patients. She was awarded the inaugural American Association of Immunologist’s Careers in Immunology Fellowship as well as funding through the Midwest Athletes Against Childhood Cancer (MACC fund). While in Dr. Capitini’s lab she investigated the potential of using macrophages to treat radiation-induced injury and GVHD. Dr. Bouchlaka received her BA in Biology and her PhD in Molecular Biology and Immunology from the University of Nevada Reno (UNR). She completed her PhD research in conjunction with UNR and UC Davis under the mentorship of Dr. William J. Murphy who served for 12 years as Director of Research at the NCI-Fredrick Maryland. Dr. Bouchlaka’s doctoral research focused on the antitumor responses of anti-CD40 and IL-2 and the disparities of their immune cell modulation in the context of aging and obesity.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Nicholas serves as President and CEO of Abintus Bio, Inc., ("Abintus"), where is also a co-founder and a member of the board of directors. Abintus is a preclinical-stage company pursuing first- and best-in-class genetics medicines that leverage a clinically proven platform technology and commercial-ready manufacturing. Nicholas has over 15 years of operational experience building value at cell/gene therapy and oncology companies from start-up to commercial and has completed over $1B of transactions covering licensing, M&A, and private/public financings. Prior to founding Abintus, Dr. Boyle was vice president, strategy and business development at Tocagen, Inc., where he was a member of the pioneering team that advanced the field of in vivo genetic medicines using retroviral vectors administered intravenously across multiple clinical trials. Before joining Tocagen he was director, corporate development at Spectrum Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SPPI) where he closed 4 licensing transactions that catalyzed an increase in market cap from <$50M to >$500M. Previously, Dr. Boyle was team leader for antiviral and oncology drug discovery at Biota (now Vaxart) and a medicinal chemist at SmithKline Beecham (now GSK). Dr. Boyle holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Sheffield University, completed his post-doctorate research at The Scripps Research Institute, was a visiting scholar at The University of North Texas, and received a Monbusho (AIST) fellowship to conduct gene editing and synthetic biology research in Tsukuba, Japan.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Andrew Bradbury is Chief Scientific Officer of Specifica. He trained in medicine at the universities of Oxford and London and received his PhD from the university of Cambridge at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology under the guidance of Nobel Laureate, Cesar Milstein. He has worked in the fields of phage and yeast display, library generation, antibody engineering and Next Generation Sequencing for over thirty years. He was a Group Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory before founding Specifica. Specifica's mission is to enable companies developing therapeutic antibodies with the world’s best antibody discovery platform.

• Display of Biologics

Dr. Bramhill has over 20 years’ experience in biologics, both in large biopharma and startup biotech companies. He has expertise in isolating and improving antibodies using phage display and other display systems and is an inventor on library design for small scaffolds and bi-specific formats. He also has experience in diverse expression systems for producing antibodies, antibody fragments and scaffolds. He has taught numerous technical courses for over 15 years at international conferences and served as a Key Opinion Leader for major BioPharma companies.

• TS9A: Introduction to Protein Engineering

Kristine Brazin received her Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in Chemistry and Biomedical Sciences. She then did her PhD studies in Biophysics at Iowa State University with Amy Andreotti where her research was directed at gaining a structural understanding of the T cell signaling protein ITK using NMR spectroscopy together with investigations using cellular assays. She went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship with Ellis Reinherz at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute studying the structure-function relationship within the T cell receptor. During this time, she gained extensive expertise in the production of the T cell receptor transmembrane containing proteins. Currently, she is a Principal Scientist in the laboratory of Ellis Reinherz, where she continues to study the T cell receptor and the interplay of structure and mechanobiology with T cell immunology.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Mary Ann Brown joined Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) in 1992 as a Data Entry Associate. At that time CHI was a start-up company with many roles to fill and explore. She quickly realized that conference production which combined creativity and love of learning was the path for her. Mary Ann’s conference portfolio is varied from biologics to batteries where she is organizes over 15 scientific meetings a year along with being a Team Lead for several Key Events. Mary Ann graduated from Doane College in 1978 with degrees in Biology, Environmental Studies, and Geology.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic
• Cell-Based Immunotherapies
• Optimizing Protein Expression
• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond
• mRNA Therapeutics
• Biophysical Methods
• Engineering Antibodies
• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Adam Brown is an Associate Professor of Biopharmaceutical Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He is also a co-founder and CTO of SynGenSys.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Dr. Brown obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Sydney, Australia, and his PhD in structural biology from Osaka University, Japan. His postdoctoral work was completed at Columbia University in the lab of Nobel Prize winner Joachim Frank and used cryo-EM to study the structure of the Hepatitis C virus Internal Ribosome Entry Site as it hijacks the canonical cellular translation machinery.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Currently part of the Bioanalytical Sciences team at Moderna. I have approximately 22 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical sciences field, focused on bioanalytical and biomarker method development and validation supporting nonclinical and clinical trials.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Christian Buchholz, PhD, heads the Section of Molecular Biotechnology and Gene Therapy at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut and is Associate Professor for Biochemistry at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt. At the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, Dr. Buchholz combines responsibilities in gene therapy medicinal product regulation with the maintenance of a research laboratory active in studying the safety and efficacy of viral vectors. Dr. Buchholz has published more than 100 articles in his research area, which focuses on the engineering of the surface of viral vectors to improve their applicability in modern molecular medicine. Most notably, Dr. Buchholz’s team has provided proof-of-principle for in vivo generation of human CAR T cell thereby making use of viral vectors targeted to T cell surface markers. Dr. Buchholz holds a PhD from the Max-Planck-Institut for Biochemistry and a diploma in Microbiology from Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Ivan Budyak received a PhD in Biophysics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2006 and is currently a Director at Eli Lilly and Company leading the Analytical Development Biophysical team. Ivan has almost two decades of experience in structural biology and biophysics including 10 years in pharmaceutical industry. He has supported development of both protein-based therapeutics and the gene therapy portfolio at Lilly. Ivan has authored over 15 peer-reviewed articles, actively served on multiple NSF IUCRC industry advisory boards as well as the USP AAV Gene Therapy Product Expert Panel.

• Biophysical Methods

Chris is a Senior Manager in BioTherapeutics Pharmaceutical Sciences at Pfizer Inc. He runs a digital strategy group dedicated to developing and implementing new digital tools and processes for Pfizer scientists, and also leads a company-wide Data Accessibility initiative focused on the creation and implementation of a universal data sharing model to allow free-flowing data across all of Pfizer’s sites and departments. Chris has 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry across multiple roles including product development, regulatory filings, and digital strategy. He holds a B.S. in Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology from Renssealaer University.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Dr. Carnevale earned her MD at Harvard Medical School and then completed internal medicine residency and oncology fellowship at UCSF. She did her postdoctoral training in the labs of Alan Ashworth and Alex Marson. Her initial postdoctoral work established a new screening strategy that allowed for the first time, genome-wide CRISPR screening in primary human T cells. She subsequently used this screening platform to identify key regulators of T cell activation and proliferation, work that nominated a number of genes as engineering targets to boost cell therapies. She went on to model various immunosuppressive conditions found in the tumor microenvironment to identify genes that regulate sensitivity/resistance to these suppressive factors. Results from this work led to her focus on RASA2 as a previously unrecognized negative regulator of T cell function. She showed that ablation of RASA2 can enhance T cell activity and long-term effector function. She is now starting her own laboratory focused on using targeted gene engineering to enhance next-generation cell therapies.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Lauren is originally from Fort Worth, Texas but has now lived in Seattle long enough to be considered a native; she has developed opinions regarding coffee as well as the ability to differentiate between partly sunny and partly cloudy. After >15 years in Seattle biotech with a focus in downstream process development and an interest in analytical and formulation, in 2014 Lauren joined the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington and established the Core Research Labs. The IPD Cores are now ten highly specialized subgroups that support and advance the research of the IPD in a myriad of ways from biophysical characterization to tech transfer. Hidden talents include pestering vendors, international shipping, and inserting esoteric vocabulary in presentations. Lauren has a Masters in Pharmaceutical Bioengineering and certificates in Project Management and Human Resources, and enjoys yoga, the Great British Baking Show, and her golden retrievers.

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows

Dr. Castellana is CEO of Abterra Biosciences.  She is passionate about mapping the natural immune response to challenge, particularly the relationship between the B-cell receptor repertoire encoded in B cells and secreted antibodies in serum.  Abterra Bio specializes in antibody discovery and sequencing, leveraging machine learning to mine the immune repertoire.  She earned a PhD in Computer Science from the UCSD, and BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

No bio available.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Andrew Chang is the cofounder and CEO of DeepSeq.AI, a data and AI-powered protein design company, empowering scientists to get their lead proteins much faster and cheaper. With extensive experience as a machine learning scientist in DNA sequencing and protein engineering, Andrew has won several global ML competitions and possesses a deep understanding of the key factors involved in building and training generalizable AI systems. Prior to founding DeepSeq.AI, he played a critical role in helping biotech startups build their wet-lab and dry-lab ML capabilities. Andrew's postdoctoral training at Genentech provided him with invaluable experience in designing and conducting high-throughput screening experiments for protein engineering. He holds a PhD in biophysics from the University of Michigan and a BS in physics from National Taiwan University.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Chari received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry & Cancer Biology from the University of Toledo College of Medicine. His dissertation focused on potential drug targets to improve outcomes of hormonal adjuvant therapy in breast and prostate cancers. Chari was on the R&D team for 7 years at DiscoverX. Currently, he is on the market development team and supports method transfers to CRO and CDMO sites for lot-release programs for biologics and biosimilars.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Nelson serves as Senior Vice President of the Platform group at Orna Therapeutics. He is a seasoned biotech veteran with over 15 years of experience focusing on developing RNA-based medicine. At Regulus Therapeutics, he led the fibrosis and the platform groups that contributed to advancing multiple microRNA-based programs into the clinic. Prior to joining Orna Therapeutics, he served as Vice President of Discovery and Translational Research at LogicBio Therapeutics where he was responsible for building out the research team and leading preclinical research of multiple AAV-mediated gene editing programs. The most advanced program, LB-001, is currently being evaluated in pediatric methylmalonic acidemia patients. Nelson received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University and was a Damon Runyon Fellow at the University of California San Diego. He is an author of over 50 peer-reviewed publications, patents, and patent applications.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Preet M. Chaudhary, M.D., Ph.D. is chief of the Jane Anne Nohl Division of Hematology and Center for the study of Blood Diseases in the Department of Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. He is also Professor of Medicine, Ronald H. Bloom Family Chair in Lymphoma Research, and Program Director of the USC/Norris Blood and Marrow Transplant Program. Dr. Chaudhary's laboratory has developed several luciferase based reporter assays to examine the expression and activity of CAR-T cells and used them to develop a next generation CAR-T platform that provides physiological TCR signaling.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Dr. Chea is the  Applied Research Manager at GenNext. She received her PhD while studying with Professor Lisa Jones at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Emily is a highly skilled research scientist in the use of LC-MS techniques for proteomics studies, focusing on utilizing IC-FPOP for proteome-wide structural biology to characterize cellular drug-target interactions. Emily has made significant contributions to FPOP and HRPF with particular emphasis on in-cell FPOP (IC-FPOP).

• Biophysical Methods

Daniel S. Chen, MD, PhD, is the Chief Medical Officer for IGM Biosciences, and former Vice President, Global Head of Cancer Immunotherapy Development at Genentech/Roche. He received a BS degree in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1990), a PhD in Microbiology & Immunology (1996) and MD (1998) from the University of Southern California. Daniel completed an Internal Medicine Residency and Medical Oncology Fellowship at Stanford University (2003). He went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship with Mark Davis in immunology and ran the metastatic melanoma clinic at the Stanford Cancer Center from 2003-2006. At Genentech from 2006-2018, he led the clinical development for atezolizumab, a PD-L1 inhibitor, from the time the program was in research through global approvals in multiple indications worldwide. At IGM, Daniel focuses on the development of novel engineered multivalent and multispecific therapeutics. He serves on the Board of Directors for SITC, gave the keynote presentation at the AACR NCI EORTC Annual Meeting 2014 and presented at the US Congressional Briefing on Immuno-Oncology in 2017. He has continued to publish with academic and industry collaborators in the field of cancer immunotherapy, including the often referenced Chen and Mellman manuscripts, “Elements of cancer immunity and the cancer-immune set point” and “Oncology meets Immunology: the Cancer-Immunity Cycle.”

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Yan brings more than 20 years of expertise in both mRNA display technology and biologic drug discovery in the oncology disease area. She was Biotherapeutics Discovery Head at Juno Therapeutics in Boston and Senior Vice President of Research at X-Body Biosciences which was acquired by Juno in 2015. Previously, she was an investigator and project leader in Oncology Biotherapeutics at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research. Earlier in her career, she was a scientist at Phylos and Adnexus playing instrumental roles in establishing the mRNA antibody and protein display technology platforms. Yan was a postdoctoral trainee in Immunology at Tufts Medical School and received her PhD in Immunology from National University of Singapore. She is the co-inventor of more than 20 patents in antibody technologies, biotherapeutics and cell therapy.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Jianzhu Chen is Professor of Biology at Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Department of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Chen received a Ph.D. degree in genetics from Stanford University. He was a postdoctoral fellow and then an instructor at Harvard Medical School before he joined the faculty at MIT. Dr. Chen’s research seeks fundamental understanding of the immune system as well as its application in disease intervention. Over the years, Dr. Chen has made significant contributions to a broad area of research in immunology, cancer research, infectious diseases, and animal models of human diseases. Recently, Dr. Chen’s research has focused on development of tumor-specific CAR-NK cells and re-programming macrophages for disease intervention, including cancer, metabolic diseases and infectious diseases.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Dr. Grace Chen obtained a BS in Chemical Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and received her PhD in Chemical Biology from Harvard University, where she worked in Dr. David Liu’s lab studying RNA modifications. Dr. Grace Chen was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Howard Chang at Stanford University researching engineered and endogenous circular RNAs. Dr. Grace Chen joined the faculty of the Yale University Department of Immunobiology in 2019 as an Assistant Professor and the Robert T. McCluskey Yale Scholar. She is a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar and an Allens Distinguished Investigator. The Chen Laboratory investigates the diverse functions and applications of circular RNAs and RNA modifications in health and disease.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Ming-Tang Chen is a Principal Scientist at Merck Discovery Biologics. An established subject matter expert on glycobiology, in vitro display technologies, and library design and construction, Ming-Tang currently leads Merck Biologics Design & Display group.

• Display of Biologics

No bio available.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Bob Chen is Senior Director of Systems Engineering at OmniAb. Dr. Chen leads the development of our xPloration® platform. Dr. Chen previously was the Chief Technology Officer and a co-Founder of xCella Biosciences, an antibody discovery and technology company, that was built on scientific research from Stanford University and MIT. Dr. Chen earned a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from MIT and a PhD in Bioengineering from Stanford University.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Yuan Cheng is a Senior Principal Scientist at Amgen and leads the Hybrid Modality unit within the Therapeutic Discovery group. She has over 25 years therapeutic discovery experience with a successful track record of advancing challenging targets from concept to clinical candidate. Her current research is focused on developing new protein conjugation technologies and the design and generation of hybrid modality therapeutics. She led the discovery effort of AMG 133, a novel dual-targeting GIPR antagonist antibody and GLP-1 peptide conjugate that is in clinical development. Prior to joining Amgen in 2002, she was a Research Fellow in Medicinal Chemistry at Merck Research Laboratories for seven years. She received her doctorate degree in Organic Chemistry from Princeton University and did postdoctoral research at Columbia University.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Henry Chiou is Senior Director and General Manager for the Delivery and Protein Expression business within Biosciences at Thermo Fisher Scientific. He and his teams have developed products such as the Expi family of 293, CHO and Sf9-based expression systems, Lipofectamine 3000, and other Lipofectamine-family transfection reagents, production systems for cell and gene therapy viral vectors such as AAV MAX system. Henry has authored multiple publications on mammalian transient expression and frequently teaches courses and lectures on this subject. Prior to joining Thermo Fisher, Henry worked in small to mid-sized biotech companies on non-viral gene therapy. Henry received his doctorate from Harvard University in Molecular Pharmacology, following which he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in viral expression systems at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Optimizing Protein Expression
• SC7: Use and Troubleshooting of Eukaryotic Expression Systems

Dr. Dong hee Chung is currently a Postdoctoral scholar in the Craik lab, at the University of California, San Francisco. He earned his PhD in Chemistry from UC Davis and was part of the Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology (DEB) program. His PhD research focused on bioinformatics-guided protein engineering for mechanistic enzymology studies of structurally similar enzymes. His current research involves using novel technology development approaches to generate high-affinity selective antibodies against challenging targets. Antibodies have been identified against a wide range of interesting targets (dsDNA, enzymes, GPCR, etc.), and have enabled various studies and applications as tools for biology (i.e., structural biology, pharmacokinetic studies. cell biological studies, etc.).

• Engineering Antibodies

Dr. Daniel Chupp currently serves as an Antibody Discovery Scientist at ABclonal, overseeing the design and completion of custom mAb discovery campaigns. Daniel obtained a PhD in Immunology at UT Health San Antonio focusing on the translational genetics and epigenetics of the immunoglobulin locus. During his academic research he developed and patented a novel humanized mouse model adapted to antibody discovery, PDX/CDX, human disease modeling, and vaccine design. 

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Peter Clark, PhD is the Head of Computational Science & Engineering within the Therapeutics Discovery (TD) organization of Janssen R&D, where he leads a dynamic, interdisciplinary team of scientists focused on accelerating the research and development of therapeutics through the design and implementation of disruptive computational approaches and platforms across all therapeutic modalities. Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson, Peter served as the Director of Bioinformatics at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, where he worked closely with academic and commercial collaborators on the design, optimization, and evaluation of various gene therapy platform technologies from early research and development through commercially partnered IND enabling clinical studies. Peter is also a clinically trained molecular pathologist (The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) with extensive experience in the design, validation, and implementation of diagnostic and prognostic next generation sequencing (NGS) assays within a clinical, CAP/CLIA certified laboratory setting. During his clinical molecular pathology fellowship at CHOP, Peter co-developed and commercialized the first to market, high resolution, next generation sequencing based HLA genotyping assay and was subsequently awarded the Scholar of the Year award by the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (ASHI) in 2015 for his contributions to the field of solid organ and bone marrow transplantation. Peter earned his B.Sc. and Ph.D. from Drexel University, School of Biomedical Engineering prior to completing a postdoctoral fellowship at The Center for Computational Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. Peter’s diverse expertise in computational science, engineering, clinical molecular genetics, computational biology, and translational research has led to the publication of over 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications as well as two book chapters, several issued patents and three biotechnology spin-off companies.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Jennifer Cochran is the Shriram Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She is a Professor of Bioengineering and, by courtesy, Chemical Engineering and a member of the Cancer Biology, Biophysics, and Immunology graduate programs. Dr. Cochran serves as the Director of the Stanford/NIH Biotechnology pre-doctoral training program, and co-Director of the Stanford NIST pre-doctoral training program. Her research group uses interdisciplinary approaches in chemistry, engineering, and biophysics to study complex biological systems and to develop new tools for basic science and biomedical applications. Dr. Cochran translational interests span protein-based drug discovery and development for applications in oncology and regenerative medicine, and development of new technologies for high-throughput protein analysis and engineering. Dr. Cochran obtained her Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biological Engineering.

• Display of Biologics

Dr. Matthew A. Coleman is a senior biomedical staff scientist and group leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as well an adjunct professor in the department of Radiation Oncology at University of California Davis School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry from Boston University. Dr. Coleman has authored over 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals, published proceedings and book chapters covering a diverse breadth of molecular biology and biochemistry. He has over 25 years experience in developing biotechnology and characterizing genomic responses of genotoxic stressors.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Russ Coleman is the Director, Strain Engineering at Ligand Pharmaceuticals, managing early process development and workflow automation activities to enable high-yield production of difficult-to-express therapeutic proteins. Over the last 20+ years, he has focused on development and implementation of the Pelican Expression Technology, a Pseudomonas-based recombinant protein expression system.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Adriana Coll De Pena is a Dominican Ph.D. Candidate in Tripathi Laboratory (Center for Biomedical Engineering) at Brown University. Prior to joining Brown, she completed a B.S. in Biotechnology and Molecular Bioscience, a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering, and an M.S. in Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research currently focuses on the development of miniaturized platforms for the detection and analysis of biomolecules.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Frank is a Director in Early Oncology Discovery at AstraZeneca within the ADC Portfolio team. He received his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, in 2000, where he studied under Professor Gerald Hart to elucidate the roles of intracellular O-GlcNAc glycosylation. He moved to the National Cancer Institute where he completed post-doctoral studies in Carole Parent’s laboratory, studying the role of the PI3 kinase pathway in spatial sensing and chemotaxis. Frank then joined Wellstat Therapeutics in 2007, where he led and contributed to several projects ranging from conjugate vaccines to therapeutic proteins, prior to joining AstraZeneca in 2012. Since joining AstraZeneca, he has held positions of increasing responsibility, with a research focus on antibody-drug conjugates and bispecific antibodies. He has served as a session organizer/chair in the “Advancing Bispecific Antibodies” track at PEGS since 2018.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Dr. Christopher Corbeil is a research officer at the National Research Council Canada (NRC) who specializes in the development and application of computational tools for biotherapeutic design and optimization. He is also an associate member of the McGill Biochemistry Department and teaches classes in Structure-Based Drug Design at McGill University. After receiving his PhD from McGill University, he joined the NRC as a Research Associate investigating the basics of protein-binding affinity. Following his time at the NRC he joined Chemical Computing Group as a research scientist developing tools for protein design, structure prediction, and binding affinity prediction. He then decided to leave private industry and rejoin NRC with a focus on antibody engineering. Dr. Corbeil has authored over 30 scientific articles and is the main developer of multiple software programs.

• TS9B: Introduction to Machine Learning for Biologics Design
• Engineering Antibodies

Throughout my PhD and postdoctoral studies, I was trained in world-renowned laboratories and institutions in the United States of America (University of Washington and The Scripps Research Institute). My PhD studies evolved in the direction of immunogen design and vaccine engineering which sparked my interest in the many needs and opportunities in vaccinology and translational research. Much of the novelty from our approaches arises for the use of rational and structure-guided strategies to design immunogens with improved immunogenic potential. To address these problems, we developed a number of computational methodologies for structure-based design of immunogens during my PhD dissertation research at the University of Washington. My efforts resulted a piece of work where we showed for the first time that computationally designed immunogens can elicit potent neutralizing antibodies. During my postdoctoral studies I joined a chemical biology laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute. In this stage I became a proficient experimentalist and developed novel chemoproteomics methods for the identification of protein-small molecule interaction sites in complex proteomes. In March 2015 I joined the ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) - Switzerland as a tenure track assistant professor. The focus of my research group is to keep developing computational tools for protein design with particular emphasis in applying these strategies to vaccine design, immunotherapy agents and CAR-T cell engineering. The activities in my laboratory focus on computational design methods development and on the biochemical and biophysical characterization of the designed proteins. I have been an inventor in multiple patent applications (provisional and granted), spanning technologies in drug profiling, vaccine development, computational protein design and T-cell engineering. Thus far we have secured several highly competitive grants including two ERC grants (Starting and Proof of Concept).

• Display of Biologics

Dr. Graham Cotton is Head of Protein Therapeutics at Almac Discovery, where he leads the company’s protein therapeutics programmes. He has been instrumental in developing Almac Discovery’s protein drug conjugates platform, combining protein engineering technologies with novel linker-payload systems to deliver next-generation monospecific and bispecific therapeutics. Graham obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, working on synthetic protein HIV therapeutics, and continued these interdisciplinary studies as a postdoctoral researcher at Edinburgh University Medical School. He then spent several years in the laboratory of Professor Tom Muir, at Rockefeller University New York, as a Burroughs Wellcome research fellow, developing novel protein engineering technologies to study cancer signaling pathways. Prior to Almac Discovery, he held senior positions at several biotech companies with a focus on protein engineering and drug discovery. Graham is also an Honorary Lecturer at The Patrick G. Johnston Centre for Cancer Research at Queen’s University Belfast.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Dr. Amy Courtney is an immunologist with over fifteen years of experience in both basic and translational research. Her research has focused primarily on invariant natural killer T (NKT) cells, specifically how to utilize their unique biological characteristics to treat various illnesses. She has worked in collaboration with others to develop and optimize protocols for isolating and ex vivo expanding human NKTs for clinical applications. She is currently the lead investigator performing correlative studies for two phase 1 clinical trials. The first trial is a first-in-human phase 1 clinical trial that utilizes ex vivo expanded NKTs expressing a chimeric antigen receptor in neuroblastoma patients (NCT03294954) and the interim results of this trial have recently been published (Heczey et al, Nat Med, 2020). The second trial is a phase 1 clinical trial with an allogeneic CD19.CAR NKT product for adult lymphoma patients (NCT03774654). She is also interested in the cross-talk between NKTs and immunosuppressive tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs), which have been shown to correlate with both metastatic disease and poor outcome in neuroblastoma patients. Her work has revealed that human NKTs mediate anti-neuroblastoma activity through both direct and indirect interactions with tumor-supportive TAMs. Currently, she is utilizing a transgenic murine model of neuroblastoma to further explore the role of NKT-TAM interactions in tumor immune surveillance.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Charles Craik is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California at San Francisco. He is the founder and former director of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Graduate Program and is a co-director of the Molecular Oncology Program in the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He received his education and training in Chemistry at Allegheny College (BS), Columbia University (Ph.D.) and UCSF (Postdoctoral). He joined the UCSF faculty in 1985 where his research interests focus on defining the roles and the mechanisms of enzymes and other challenging proteins in complex biological processes and on developing technologies to facilitate these studies. The current research in the Craik lab focuses on the chemical biology of proteolytic and protein degradation enzymes, receptors and membrane transporters. A particular emphasis of his work is on identifying the roles and regulating the activity of key proteins associated with infectious diseases, neurodegeneration and cancer. He is also interested in developing novel methods to biophysically characterize challenging proteins as well as their complexes. These studies coupled with his global substrate profiling, antibody engineering and noninvasive imaging efforts are providing a better understanding of both the chemical make-up and the biological importance of these critical proteins to aid in the rapid detection, monitoring and control of infectious disease, neurological disorders and cancer. Craik is a council member of the American Association of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Dr. Curran received a Ph.D. in Immunology from Stanford University where he was awarded the McDevitt prize for the best graduate thesis in his year. Dr. Curran was the first recipient of the prestigious American Cancer Society Levy Fellowship to fund his postdoctoral studies in the lab of Dr. James P. Allison. While pursuing his postdoctoral studies at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Dr. Curran published several influential manuscripts describing how T cell co-stimulatory pathways could be modulated in tandem to mediate immunologic rejection of melanomas in mice. Dr. Curran was the first to describe how combination blockade of the T cell co-inhibitory receptors CTLA-4 and PD-1 promoted the rejection of a majority of murine melanomas - a combination that remains the most effective FDA-approved immunotherapy. At the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. Curran is an Associate Professor of Immunology and his Lab seeks to discover the underlying mechanisms of immune resistance in the “coldest” tumors, pancreatic and prostate adenocarcinoma and glioblastoma, so that rational therapeutic interventions can be developed to restore T cell infiltration and sensitivity to T cell checkpoint blockade. This research focuses on normalization of tumor oxygen metabolism to increase T cell metabolic fitness, activation of innate pro-inflammatory immune sensors capable of re-programming tumor myeloid stroma, and on discovery of novel immune checkpoint antibodies capable of depleting stromal elements responsible for T cell exclusion and function suppression.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Marc Damelin is Vice President and Head of Biology at Mersana Therapeutics, where he is focused on ADC discovery and development in Oncology. Prior, he was at Pfizer, where he led ADC discovery teams, oversaw the ADC portfolio, and mentored two postdoctoral fellows. He is the Editor of the book “Innovations for Next-Generation Antibody-Drug Conjugates” published by Springer in 2018. Marc received his PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation at Columbia University.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Tal Danino is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. His lab focuses on engineering bacteria for biomedical applications, with a particular emphasis on developing bacteria as a cancer therapy. Tal received a PhD in Bioengineering from UCSD in Jeff Hasty's lab, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research with Sangeeta Bhatia. He is the recipient of awards including the NSF CAREER Award, Era of Hope Scholar Award, CRI Lloyd J Old STARS Award, Pershing Prize, and is a TED Fellow. He directs the Synthetic Biological Systems Laboratory and is a member of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center and Data Science Institute.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

No bio available.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

After obtaining her PhD from the University of London in 2001, Claire Davies performed her postdoctoral work at the William Harvey Research Institute (WHRI) at Bart’s and The London, Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry and Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston. Over the last 20 years, Dr. Davies has led analytical and CMC teams in product development and analytical method development and validation. Currently, Dr. Davies leads Bioanalytics, a group responsible for developing methods and strategies to support process development, product characterization and release and stability testing for therapeutic proteins and gene therapy products in preclinical and clinical development.

• SC5: Introduction to Gene Therapy Product Manufacturing and Analytics

Daniel Dayeh is a Principal Scientist at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in the Protein Biochemistry Group working on method development and characterization of nucleic acid therapeutics. Prior to joining Regeneron, Daniel pursued post-doctoral studies at The Rockefeller University exploring host-pathogen interactions of RNA viruses and earned his PhD from the Ohio State University studying the enzymology and structural biology of RNA interference complexes.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Dr. Ruud de Wildt has more than 20 years of experience within the Biotech and Biopharmaceutical industry. His teams have delivered many therapeutic candidate molecules across several therapeutic areas including oncology, respiratory, immunological and infectious diseases. This includes GSK’s OX-40, ICOS antibodies and a long acting IL-5 antibody which are currently in phase I/II clinical studies. He currently holds a position as Director, heading up Antibody Discovery in Biopharm in GSK. In this role he is responsible for the early stage Biopharm pipeline for GSK. His team uses in-vitro and in-vivo Antibody Discovery processes for discovery and optimization of mAbs and bi-specific antibodies. Before GSK, he held a position as Associate Director in Domantis, the domain antibody company. He was one of the key scientist responsible for the generation of domain antibody libraries and managed a number of therapeutic programs including an anti- TNFR1 dAb which progressed into phase II clinical studies. Prior to Domantis he did a post-doc at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, with Dr. Greg Winter and Dr. Ian Tomlinson to develop high density antibody arrays. He did his PhD in the dept. of Biochemistry at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. This involved studies of the paired B cell repertiore in automimune diseases. He did his undergraduate in Medical Biology at the same university.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Dr. Brandon DeKosky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT and a Core Member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, Harvard, and MIT. Research efforts at the DeKosky lab have developed a suite of high-throughput single-cell platforms for comprehensive analyses of adaptive immunity. These efforts are advancing new approaches in biologic drug discovery, and for the comprehensive analyses of genetic and functional diversity in adaptive immune cells. The group seeks to reveal the quantitative principles that govern effective adaptive immunity and provide molecular design strategies for vaccines and biologics to combat global infectious agents including HIV-1, malaria, and SARS-CoV-2. The DeKosky lab is also investigating quantitative principles of immune regulation and establishing new approaches for targeted and personalized cancer therapies. Dr. DeKosky has been awarded several honors for his research program. His PhD research was supported by a Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship, an NSF Graduate Fellowship, and a Donald. D. Harrington Graduate Fellowship. In 2016, DeKosky was awarded a K99 Pathway to Independence Award and an NIH Early Independence Award and began a joint faculty appointment at the University of Kansas Departments of Chemical Engineering and Pharmaceutical Chemistry. He has also received the Department of Defense Career Development Award, the Biomedical Engineering Society Rising Star Award, and the AIChE Young Faculty Futures award. In 2021, Dr. DeKosky began as an Assistant Professor in a joint appointment at MIT Chemical Engineering and The Ragon Institute.

• TS10B: Analysis and Interpretation of Antibody Deep Sequencing and Single Cell Analysis Data

Matthew P. DeLisa is the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University and also the Director of the Cornell Institute of Biotechnology. His research focuses on understanding and controlling the molecular mechanisms underlying protein biogenesis -- folding and assembly, membrane translocation and post-translational modifications -- in the complex environment of a living cell. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1996; a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2001; and did postdoctoral work at the University of Texas-Austin, Department of Chemical Engineering. DeLisa joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University in 2003. DeLisa has received over a dozen honorific distinctions and prestigious awards for his accomplishments in research including an NSF CAREER Award, a NYSTAR Watson Young Investigator Award, a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, an MIT Technology Review TR35 Award (Top 35 Young Innovators under the age of 35), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a NYSTAR Distinguished Faculty Award, the Wiley-Blackwell Biotechnology and Bioengineering Wang Award, and the American Chemical Society BIOT Division Young Investigator Award. More recently, DeLisa was selected to the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group in 2014 and was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2014, the American Academy of Microbiology in 2019, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins
• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Jason DelCarpini has been working the field of regulated bioanalysis for over 20 years. Over that time, he has acquired extensive experience developing and validating PK, PD, and immunogenicity assays for various modalities (bispecific/functional conjugates, cell & gene therapies, mRNA therapeutics, monoclonal antibodies, enzyme replacement therapies, Fc-fusion proteins). He has worked for several industry-leading companies such as Genzyme (sanofi), Acceleron Pharma, bluebird bio, Pfizer, and BioAgilityx. He is currently an Associate Director of Bioanalytical and Molecular Assays at Moderna where he leads the LBA team for in-house PK, PD, and Immunogenicity analysis.

• mRNA Therapeutics
• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

After his PhD work in structural biology at Iowa State University, Jared joined AstraZeneca (then MedImmune) in 2017. As an Associate Director in Analytical Sciences, he supports late stage development, CMC, developability, and biochemical and biophysical characterization of therapeutic proteins, mAbs, and other next-generation molecules.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Dr. Demarest is the Chief Scientific Officer at Tentarix Biotherapeutics, a company with a platform for delivering powerful biological activity directed in a highly targeted manner using affinity and avidity to achieve specificity. Prior to joining Tentarix in 2020, he held positions at Lilly, Biogen Idec, Diversa Corp., and Syngenta, working as a Protein Chemist/Engineer on antibody and protein therapeutics design and biochemistry. He performed his graduate work at SUNY Stony Brook, studying protein-folding mechanisms. He was an NIH-sponsored postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute, studying the structure, folding, and binding of nuclear co-activator proteins.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Dr Deonarain studied at Imperial College and Cambridge University where he carried out PhD research into protein engineering. From 1997-2011 Dr Deonarain was a Principle Investigator at Imperial College in Antibody Technology, which led to some novel technologies being developed commercially. Dr Deonarain now retains an honorary position. He has published over 80 papers and patents in protein/antibody engineering/conjugates. In 2014, he co-founded Antikor Biopharma where he is the CEO leading a team to develop the next-generation of antibody-fragment based ADCs

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Dr. Desjarlais is the Senior Vice President, Research and CSO at Xencor, Inc. Since joining Xencor in 2001, Dr. Desjarlais has overseen the company’s engineering, discovery, and preclinical work on antibodies and other proteins. With his coworkers, Dr. Desjarlais has developed several novel technologies for the optimization of antibodies and other proteins, including a platform for generation of bispecific antibodies, and has led the discovery of multiple therapeutic antibody candidates, including CD3 bispecific antibodies, checkpoint bispecific antibodies, and cytokine-Fc fusions for treatment of a variety of diseases. Dr. Desjarlais oversees all of Xencor’s discovery research and preclinical activities, from project conception and candidate generation through preclinical proof-of-concept and early development. Prior to Xencor, Dr. Desjarlais was an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Penn State University (1997-2001), where he developed and tested methods for the de novo design of protein sequences. He began his work in the field of protein design as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow at UC Berkeley. Dr. Desjarlais holds a PhD in Biophysics from the Johns Hopkins University and a BS degree in Physics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Following undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge I obtained my PhD at the Centre for Tumour Biology at Queen Mary University of London then undertook post-doctoral work at the Centre for Experimental Medicine & Rheumatology (WHRI, London) and subsequently at the University of Cambridge Department of Oncology. Since 2012, I have been working at the Antibody Engineering department at Genentech. My research interests focus on large molecule design, selection, and engineering for therapeutic and/or diagnostic purposes.

• Engineering Antibodies

Ray DiDonato received his Ph.D. in Biology from Boston University in 2002.  He was subsequently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, first studying the genomics of iron uptake in plants, followed by studying the genomes and transcriptomes of environmentally relevant microbes.  Ray has been involved in the biotech industry for the past 15 years, most recently as a business development product specialist at Agilent before joining DNA Script in 2022.  He is passionate about genomics and synthetic biology and how these areas can positively impact the human condition.

• Engineering Antibodies

Petra has 30 years’ experience of drug development in the Pharmaceutical industry with a focus on supporting CMC activities.  She has held leadership positions in Project Management, Technical Operations and Business Development.  Working in the CRO and CDMO environment she has led projects for customers across the globe, helping them to achieve their goals in clinical trials and low volume commercial manufacture.  Petra holds a D.Phil in synthetic organic chemistry.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Igor Dikiy is a scientist in the Protein Biochemistry group at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, where driving development of applications of NMR spectroscopy to various biologic drug modalities, currently focusing on using NMR spectroscopy to establish HOS comparability for mAbs. Igor was a postdoc at the CUNY ASRC with Dr. Kevin Gardner and got his PhD from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences with Dr. David Eliezer.

• Biophysical Methods

Dr. Nazzareno Dimasi has over 20 years of experience in global pharmaceutical organizations in large molecule discovery, engineering, and development. A Ph.D. graduate of the University of Rome 'Tor Vergata', Dr. Dimasi has authored more than 65 peer-reviewed publications and holds four issued U.S. patents, as well as more than 50 published patent applications. Currently, Dr. Dimasi serves as the head of antibody discovery at Sanofi in Cambridge, U.S.

• Display of Biologics

Dr. Diver is a board-certified Gynecologic Oncologist who joined ImmunoGen as a Medical Director in the mirvetuximab program in 2022.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

• Rakesh Dixit is an accomplished executive, inventor, and scientist with over 35 years of success with top biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Medimmune - AstraZeneca. Currently, he is President and CSO of Regio Biosciences and Bionavigen, LLC. He is a Board Member of Regio Biosciences and a key member of multiple scientific advisory boards. Rakesh is also a chief adviser and consultant for more than 20 companies worldwide. His biopharmaceutical peers selected Rakesh as one of the 100 Most Inspiring People in the Pharmaceutical Industry by PharmaVOICE in 2015. Rakesh received the Most Prestigious Award of Long-Standing Contribution to ADCs by World ADC (Hanson-Wade), 2020. From 2006 to 2019, Rakesh was a Global Vice President of the Biologics R&D at Medimmune - AstraZeneca. Rakesh has unique expertise in developing biologics (e.g., monoclonal antibodies, bispecific biologics, antibody-drug conjugates, fusion proteins, peptides, gene and cell therapies, etc.) and small-molecule biopharmaceuticals. His areas of expertise include discovery, early and late preclinical development, safety assessment, DMPK, and translational sciences. Dr. Dixit conducted extensive graduate and post-graduate training in Pharmacology/Toxicology-Biochemistry with both Indian and USA Institutions (e.g., Case Western Reserve University, Medical College of Ohio, University of Nebraska) and is a Diplomate and Board Certified in Toxicology from the American Board of Toxicology, Inc. since 1992.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

After obtaining his master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013, Scott Dooley began working for the Analytical Development department at Sanofi. Over the past 8 years, Mr. Dooley has supported analytical method development and validation for enzyme-replacement therapies, antibodies, and gene therapy products, and acted as the analytical team leader for several products. Currently, Mr. Dooley acts as the analytical team leader within CMC for two products in clinical development.

• SC5: Introduction to Gene Therapy Product Manufacturing and Analytics

Matthew is currently the head of the Eukaryotic Expression Group for Protein Expression Laboratory (PEL) at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Frederick, Maryland. The Eukaryotic Expression Group expresses a variety of proteins in support of the NCI RAS Initiative and for investigators at the National Institutes of Health. The Eukaryotic Expression Group also focuses heavily on inventing and developing novel technologies to improve protein expression and production with a focus primarily on baculovirus production. Matthew received his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland and then went to work as a Production Scientist at Trevigen, Inc. where he helped to express and produce the company’s large portfolio of products as well as help in the development of many of their new products. Matthew joined the PEL in 2015 and has since helped the PEL and RAS Initiative to improve the overall expression of numerous proteins and complexes.

• SC7: Use and Troubleshooting of Eukaryotic Expression Systems

Milos Drobnjakovic is an expert in developing smart data standards for various manufacturing domains, as well as developing and applying machine learning and hybrid models in both drug development and biomanufacturing control. Currently, he is the project lead for NIIMBL Big Data Adaptive control group and the key contributor to developing an Ontological Standard for biomanufacturing. Also, he is the co-chair of the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) Core Ontology working group and leads an effort to apply ontologies in advancing machine learning approaches in biomanufacturing and additive manufacturing.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Leader of a small team responsible for recombinant protein production at Moderna, focusing on difficult targets. Over 15 years of protein production experience in the biotech industry. Experience utilizing multiple host systems, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic, to produce incredibly diverse proteins native to bacteria, plants, and humans.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins
• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows

Jakob Dupont is a renowned expert in the fields of cell therapy and oncology, with deep experience in developing therapies and programs dedicated to addressing high unmet medical needs. Dr. Dupont serves as Global Head of Research & Development including Medical and Regulatory Affairs at Atara Biotherapeutics. Prior to joining Atara, he served as the Chief Medical Officer at Gossamer Bio, overseeing global development, regulatory and quality activities for the company and advancing therapeutics in the disease areas of immunology, inflammation, and oncology.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Matthew Eddy received his PhD in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Professor Robert Griffin. During his PhD, Dr. Eddy developed new approaches for using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in the solid state to determine structures of membrane proteins in cellular-like environments. Following his PhD, Dr. Eddy joined the laboratories of Professors Raymond Stevens and Kurt Wuthrich at The Scripps Research Institute as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow, applying an integrative structural biology approach to study human G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and focusing on applications of nuclear magnetic resonance to improve our understanding of GPCR allosteric functions. Dr. Eddy is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida and affiliated faculty of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. His group continues to study human GPCRs to understand the role of the cellular environment in regulating GPCR dynamics, structure, and function.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Based at the Charles River Laboratories High Peak site, UK, Caitlin is responsible for growing the Retrogenix Cell Microarray Technology in the East of North America. She joined Charles River 8 months ago. 

Caitlin has a PhD in Gene Expression Studies  from UCLAN, UK and an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry. Her previous experiences include working for top ten pharmaceutical companies, and in clinical trials at one of the UKs premier cancer hospitals.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Kutlu is a Senior Director in T cell Therapeutics group at Sana Biotechnology leading research on in vivo-generated CAR T cells programs. He received his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Louisville, and has worked in various research roles at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Jounce Therapeutics, and Obsidian Therapeutics. Kutlu has extensive experience in tumor immunology and immunotherapy, and has been involved in development of immunotherapies including monoclonal antibodies, cytokines, and CAR T cells.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Dr. Adel ElSohly is a Principal Scientist and Group Leader at Genentech in the Protein Chemistry department within the Large Molecule Drug Discovery group. In addition, he holds a joint appointment in Immunology Discovery. His PhD research was in organic synthesis and catalysis at Columbia University. After completing his PhD, Adel performed his postdoctoral studies at UC Berkeley focusing on new bioconjugation technologies and the development of functional protein-based biomolecular materials. Since joining Genentech, Adel's research has focused on the design and application of novel and emerging modalities to address critical unmet medical needs across a broad range of therapeutic areas. In his spare time, Adel enjoys rock climbing, woodworking, and watching his kids play soccer.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

M. Frank Erasmus is the head of bioinformatics at Specifica, Inc. where he specializes in the use of next-generation sequencing technologies and software development to aid in the design of and selection from therapeutic antibody libraries. Formerly, Frank was awarded a national fellowship from the National Cancer Institute for his translational research associated with B cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia conducted at the Spatiotemporal Modeling Center and Los Alamos National Labs. He brings over 13 years of experience in both biotechnology and academic settings in the development and characterization of therapeutic antibodies using theoretical modeling, bioinformatics, and experimental approaches.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

John Erve is from Chicago and studied Chemistry (BS, MS) at the University of Chicago and earned a PhD in Toxicology at Oregon State University. Following postdoctoral work at Vanderbilt (1995-1999) he joined BD-Biosciences (Woburn, MA) as a Study Director. In 2002, he joined AstraZeneca (Sweden) where he characterized reactive metabolites. In 2004 he joined Wyeth (Collegeville, PA) as a Principal Scientist responsible for metabolite identification. In 2010, John joined Novartis (Cambridge, MA) as a Lab Head in Analytical Sciences. John returned to drug metabolism at Elan Pharmaceuticals (San Francisco, CA) in 2012 and later formed Jerve Scientific Consulting, Inc to help small biotech companies in the Bay area with their drug discovery efforts. John was a certified D.A.B.T. from 2004 to 2019.

• SC4: An Introduction to Protein Degraders: A Focus on PROTACs

Dr. Esposito is currently the Director of the Protein Expression Laboratory (PEL) and Project Lead for the RAS Reagents Core at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Frederick, Maryland. The 33 employees in the PEL clone, express, and purify proteins from a variety of host organisms in support of the NCI RAS Initiative and for investigators at the National Institutes of Health. In addition, the PEL invents and develops novel technologies for improving protein expression and production, focused heavily on baculovirus expression technology and combinatorial cloning. Prior to his role as director, Dr. Esposito led the Clone Optimization Group in the PEL for nine years and was responsible for the generation of over 15,000 expression clones, 400 new expression vectors, and several technological innovations in protein expression. Dr. Esposito received his B.A. in Chemistry at La Salle University in Philadelphia, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. John Scocca at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School where he studied bacteriophage site-specific recombination. Dr. Esposito then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Craigie at the NIDDK, where he studied the protein-DNA interactions involved in the HIV integration reaction. Prior to joining the FNL in 2001, Dr. Esposito worked for three years as a Staff Scientist in the Protein Engineering group at Life Technologies, where he helped to develop the Gateway recombinational cloning system. Dr. Esposito has published more than 70 peer-reviewed manuscripts in the fields of protein expression and DNA recombination.

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows
• Optimizing Protein Expression

Aurora received her PhD from the University of New Mexico and has 9 years of experience in cellular analysis at UNM, BennuBio, and Berkeley Lights. She spent 2 years supporting Beacon users across the globe and is now leading development efforts for the Cell Line Development workflow. She is incredibly proud to be part of a company that is allowing us to ask increasingly complex biological questions.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Iman is currently working as Director of High Throughput Protein Expression group in Biologics Discovery organization at Johnson and Johnson. Prior to this role, he worked in Protein Engineering group at Merck. He has a PhD in Chemical Engineering with focus in Synthetic Biology at Penn State University.

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows
• Optimizing Protein Expression

Mathieu Ferrari is the Senior Director of Binder Discovery at Autolus Therepautics, leading the antibody and protein engineering group. With a long-lasting interest in advanced therapeutic innovations in oncology and autoimmune disorders, he has focused his research on the development of novel biologics and cellular immunotherapies. Current focus revolves around the development of next-generation CAR T products, multi-specific antibody modalities and antibody-drug conjugates.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Nicolas Fischer obtained a PhD in Biology from the Department of Molecular Biology University of Geneva on the structure and function of photosynthetic complexes. As a postdoctoral fellow he joined the Group of Sir Greg Winter at the MRC Department of Molecular Biology in Cambridge UK to study protein folding and Antibody engineering using phage display. In 2001 he joined NovImmune and led several therapeutic antibody discovery programs that have reached clinical development stage and developed next generation bispecific therapeutic antibodies. After the successful divestment of the FDA approved anti-INFg antibody Emapalumab, Novimmune now focuses on its bispecific technology under the brand Light Chain Bioscience in which Nicolas serves as CEO.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Sarel Fleishman is an associate professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where his research team develops a computational protein-design methodology to address challenges in biochemistry and protein engineering. As a postdoc with David Baker in Seattle (2007-2011), Sarel developed the first accurate methods for designing protein binders, culminating in the design of broad-specificity influenza inhibitors. At the Weizmann Institute (2011-), his team developed protein design methods to the level of accuracy and reliability required to design large and complex proteins such as enzymes, antibodies, and vaccine immunogens - a protein that was designed in the Fleishman lab has recently been approved for mass production as a vaccine for malaria. The team recently developed a fully automated method, called PROSS, for dramatically improving the stability and expressibility of recalcitrant proteins and several design methods for improving affinity, specificity, and catalytic rates in antibodies and enzymes. Current focuses include developing methods for designing large repertoires comprising millions of enzymes or antibodies for one-shot isolation of highly active, specific, and stable binders, inhibitors, or enzymes. Among Sarel’s academic awards were the Clore Ph.D. Fellowship (2003-2006), the Science Magazine award for a young molecular biologist (2008), a postdoctoral fellowship (2006-2009) and a career-development award (2012-2015) from the Human Frontier Science Program, European Research Council Starting and Consolidator Grants (ongoing), the Alon Fellowship, the Henri Gutwirth Prize, and the Weizmann Scientific Council Award.

• Display of Biologics

Ryan is a New Jersey native who completed his undergraduate training at MIT, where he worked in the lab of Phillip Sharp on small noncoding RNA biology. Subsequently, he moved to Stanford where he completed his MD and PhD with Howard Chang, developing methods to study RNA-protein interactions. From this work, he won the Weintraub Graduate Student Award. As a post-doc he changed fields to learn both chemistry and glycobiology with Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Postdoctoral Fellow. At the beginning of 2021, the Flynn Lab opened at Boston Children’s Hospital in the Stem Cell Program and the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University. The Flynn Lab is currently focused on advancing methods and mechanisms surrounding the glycoRNA molecule, which operates at the interface of RNA biology and the secretory pathway.

• mRNA Therapeutics

No bio available.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Shelley Force Aldred is the founder and CEO of Rondo Therapeutics, an emerging preclinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing bispecific therapeutic antibodies that enable controlled activation of the immune system to fight cancer. Previously, Dr. Force Aldred served for as Vice President for Preclinical Development at TeneoBio, a highly successful multispecific therapeutic antibody company. She was part of the formation of TeneoBio and led the preclinical efforts creating a CD3xBCMA bispecific antibody, from product concept to IND-ready package. Dr. Force Aldred was formerly director of worldwide R&D for Active Motif following the acquisition of SwitchGear Genomics in 2013. In 2006, she co-founded SwitchGear Genomics, a venture-backed functional genomics platform company, and she served as its COO and Board Member. Prior to founding SwitchGear Genomics, Dr. Force Aldred was a Scientific Director on Stanford’s ENCODE Project and received her PhD from Stanford University.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Mark received his PhD from University College London in 2003. His post graduate research in the laboratory of Professor Karl Hale was synthesising the antitumour macrolide Bryostatins resulting in the enantioselective formal total synthesis of Bryostatin 7. Mark has worked in various roles at KuDOS Pharmaceuticals, Pharminox and more recently PolyTherics/Abzena. He is an expert in the design and development of Antibody Drug Conjugate (ADC) linkers and was instrumental in building Abzena’s site-specific ThioBridge® conjugation technology platform now in Phase II for the production of stable and homogeneous ADCs, as well as Abzena’s site-specific polymer PEGylation linker technology including TheraPEG™, CyPEG™ and HiPEG™, for the half-life extension of peptides and proteins. Mark joined Bicycle Therapeutics in 2022 heading the Peptide, Organic and Medicinal Chemistry Groups in the UK, involving the design and development of bicyclic peptide drugs and conjugates. Mark’s focus is in developability assessment and he has 42 publications and patents in the field of early stage drug discovery.

• Display of Biologics

Eric is the CESO of Mosaic Biosciences, a company that provides protein therapeutic discovery research and strategic direction to biotechnology companies. Prior to that, Eric was, chronologically, CSO for Ohana Biosciences, CSO at Eleven Biotherapeutics, Senior Vice President of Research and Preclinical Development of Adnexus Therapeutics, Inc., Vice President of Preclinical Development of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where he supported the BLAs for Eylea, Zaltrap, and Arcalyst. Prior to that he held various senior level research positions at GlaxoSmithKline plc, where he invented the HIV protease inhibitor Lexiva. Eric received an A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in Biochemistry from Brandeis University and was a postdoctoral scientist at University of California San Francisco.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Shona has a Master Degree in molecular biology & genetics, she has been graduated of the University of Paris, in 2019.

She has an extensive pratical laboratory experience. His expertise leads her to work on antibody development from research use to therapeutic use with international clients and plethora of projects.  She has joined ProteoGenix to help projects come to fruition, since January 2022.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Gautham Gampa is a Principal Scientist in the Preclinical and Translational pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (PTPK) group within Research and Early Development organization at Genentech, South San Francisco, California, USA. His current work at Genentech focuses on supporting PK/PD efforts to guide the design, development, and delivery of biologics (bispecifics, fusion proteins, and other antibody-based therapeutic modalities) in early-stage research to clinical development. Prior to joining Genentech, Gautham received a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where his research involved evaluation of brain delivery of novel targeted therapies.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Professor Gao received his college education at the University of Science of Technology of China (USTC), where he received Guo MoRuo Fellowship, the highest honor a USTC undergraduate could have. In 1999, Professor Gao came to the United States to pursue graduate education, for which he worked with Professor Eric Kool in the Chemistry Department of Stanford University. As a graduate student, Professor Gao worked on the synthesis and evaluation of novel DNA analogues. In 2004, Professor Gao moved to the Scripps Research Institute, where he was a post-doctoral fellow with Professor Jeff Kelly. His post-doctoral work exploited chemical protein synthesis to understand protein folding and stability. Professor Gao started his independent career at Boston College in 2007 and was awarded tenure in 2013. The Gao group research lies at the interface of organic chemistry, chemical biology, and microbiology. His group develops novel chemistries and strategies to enable probe/inhibitor design for important biological targets that are undruggable by traditional synthetic molecules. Specifically, Gao and coworkers have reported the utilization of polar- interactions (Acc. Chem. Res, 2013) and dynamic covalent chemistry (Acc. Chem. Res, 2019) in molecular design to target biomolecules. Furthermore, the Gao group has integrated these novel binding mechanisms into high-throughput screening platforms for molecular probe discovery. The research of the Gao group has resulted in forty publications and attracted funding from both NSF and NIH. Professor Gao was recognized by a Smith Family Young Investigator Award (2007), an Ono Pharma Breakthrough Science Award (2020), and a Distinguished Faculty Award (2019) from the Chinese-American Chemistry & Chemical Biology Professors Association (CAPA). He was also the recipient of the Boston College’s Teaching & Mentoring Award of 2020.

• Display of Biologics

Francis obtained his PhD in Biochemistry from University of Sherbrooke in 2015, during which he developed a molecular docking program for docking small molecules to flexible protein or RNA targets. While doing his PhD studies, Francis co-founded a successful IT company for automating the management of scientific conferences. Francis joined the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada in 2016, where he has taken part in and led various efforts in the discovery and engineering of antibodies or other biologics. In such efforts are included the structure prediction of antibodies alone or in complex, the affinity assessment of antibody-antigen complexes, and the detection of antibody developability issues. Francis is leading the technical efforts in using artificial intelligence for antibody discovery.

• TS9B: Introduction to Machine Learning for Biologics Design

Dr. Xin Ge is an Associate Professor of Molecular Medicine and Fortson Distinguished Chair in Neurodegenerative Disease Research at University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Trained as a chemical engineer at Tsinghua University, he obtained his PhD from McMaster University and did his postdoc at UT Austin with Dr. George Georgiou. He was faculty at University of California Riverside during 2011-2021 and joined UT Health in 2021.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Dr. Gee received his B.S. degree in Biology at the California Institute of Technology in 2013, where he published and patented work engineering T cell receptors for adoptive T cell therapy in the laboratory of David Baltimore. Following that, he received his Ph.D. in Immunology with an additional core focus in Computational Immunology at Stanford University in the laboratory of K. Christopher Garcia in 2017, publishing his main work on novel technology to identify the specificities of T cell receptors for application in oncology. He completed further work on characterizing the structural basis of T cell receptor recognition of immunological targets and T cell receptor cross-reactivity. Dr. Gee has had prior work experience at the National Cancer Institute, where his primary focuses were in immunology, structural biology, protein engineering, systems biology, bioinformatics, and algorithms for the application of therapeutic- and early- discovery in immuno-oncology. He is currently VP, Target Discovery at 3T Biosciences since co-founding the company in 2017.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Nimish Gera is the Vice President of Biologics at Mythic Therapeutics leading multiple projects to engineer and develop novel antibody and antibody-based drugs in oncology and immuno-oncology. Prior to Mythic, Nimish has over ten years of experience in antibody and protein engineering with five years leading bispecific antibody programs in several disease areas such as rare diseases, oncology and immunology at Alexion Pharmaceuticals and Oncobiologics. Nimish received his PhD degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from North Carolina State University and a B.Tech degree in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

• SC6: Developability of Bispecific Antibodies

I am currently leading the recombinant protein production efforts of the RAS Initiative at the Frederick National Laboratory in Frederick, MD.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Jochem has been at Bristol-Myers Squibb for 14 years in different roles of responsibility focused on biologics drug development. For the last 8 years he has been focused on building a group for pre-clinical immunogenicity risk assessment and mitigation. He received his training at the University of Groningen and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

No bio available.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy
• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies
• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics
• Difficult-to-Express Proteins
• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety
• Display of Biologics

No bio available.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Dr. Victor Greiff is Associate Professor for Computational and Systems Immunology at the University of Oslo. His work focuses specifically on the development of machine learning, computational and experimental tools for the analysis, prediction and engineering of adaptive immune receptor repertoires.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Founder of the Harbour Mice Fully Human Antibody Platform

Scientific Founder of Nona Biosciences

Professor and Head of the Department of Cell Biology at the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam - Netherlands

Dr. Grosveld obtained his Ph.D. degree from McGill University in Montreal and completed two postdoctoral periods with Prof. Charles Weissmann in Zurich and with Prof. Richard Flavell in Amsterdam and London. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Professor Torbjorn Graslund holds a Ph.D. in Biotechnology from KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, since 2001. After two years of post-doc training with Professor Carlos Barbas at the Scripps Research Institute, he has been principal investigator at the Department of Protein Science at KTH since 2003. His main research focus is on designing proteins for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. He has a particular focus on oncology applications but is also active in the field of auto-immune diseases. Dr. Graslund is the inventor of several patents in the field.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

I am an assistant professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Global Health. My research focuses on analysis of antibody Fc-mediated innate immune effector functions in the context of SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, and Ebola virus. We use a Systems Serology approach to identify immune correlates associated with disease outcome or vaccination efficacy.

• Engineering Antibodies

Dr. Gunsior is Senior Director and Head of Translational Sciences at Astria Therapeutics, responsible for delivering translational medicine and bioanalytical objectives to support all stages of a therapeutic drug program. Prior to joining Astria, Dr. Gunsior was in the TS/TM group at Viela Bio (acquired by Horizon Therapeutics) overseeing clinical and nonclinical bioanalytical work, managing toxicology studies, and incorporating TM objectives into clinical studies. She joined Viela Bio from AstraZeneca/MedImmune, first beginning her career in the pharmaceutical/biotech industry at Covance Laboratories (now Labcorp). Dr. Gunsior served as the first Chair of the Women in Pharmaceutical Sciences Community within AAPS, is currently leading the ADA Clinical Relevance sub-team, and is a member of the extended Biomarker and Precision Medicine Community Leadership Team within AAPS.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Dr. Guo, a fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors and a pioneer of RNA nanotechnology, has held three endowed chair positions at three different prestigious universities, and currently is the Sylvan G. Frank Endowed Chair in Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery and the director of the Center for RNA Nanobiotechnology and Nanomedicine at The Ohio State University (OSU). He is the president of the International Society of RNA Nanotech and Nanomedicine (ISRNN). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and conducted his postdoctoral training at NIH under Bernard Moss (a member of the US NAS and the pioneer of vaccinia virus as a vaccine vector). He joined Purdue University in 1990, was tenured in 1993, and became a full professor in 1997, honored as a Purdue Distinguished Faculty Scholar in 1998. He served as the Director of the NIH Nanomedicine Development Center (NDC) from 2006-2011, and was the Director of the NCI Cancer Nanotech Platform Partnership Program from 2012-2017. To date, Dr. Guo invented 70 patents (16 granted and 54 in Provisional and PCT), 239 high-impact publications, and was named World’s Top 2% Scientists ranking by Stanford University. He first proposed the idea that a large number of small RNA (sRNA) exist in cells with undiscovered novel function (Guo P et al. A small viral RNA is required for in vitro packaging of bacteriophage phi29 DNA. Science 1987; 236: 690); constructed 1st viral DNA packaging motor (PNAS 1986); discovered phi29 motor pRNA (Science, 1987); proved the concept of RNA nanotechnology (Molecular Cell 1998, featured in Cell,1998; 4 papers in Nat nanotechnology 2009, 2010, 2011, 2018; Nature Comm, 2019); he invented a novel method for the production of the vaccinia virus mRNA capping enzyme (PNAS, 1990 ,7:4023) that are used currently as an essential component for the production of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine; his team invented a patented method for the production of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine; invented a method for the use of TIRF System to count single molecules (EMBOJ, 2007); invented a unique method for single pore sensing by incorporating phi29 motor channel into the membrane (Nat nanotechnology, 2009); discovered a 3rd class of biomotor using revolving mechanism without rotation; discovered that RNA is like rubber and amoeba with unusually high efficiency for spontaneous and efficient tumor targeting and regression with quick kidney clearance, thus undetectable toxicity; he invented the methods to use RNA nanotechnology to make the insoluble and toxic cancer drugs soluble and undebatable nontoxicity; he invented RNA nanotechnology to decorate exosomes with a ligand for cancer targeting using the directionality of arrow-shape RNA (Nat Nanotechnology, 2017); he invented a exosome-method for the delivery of RNAi to the cytosol of cancer cells without endosome trapping; his team invented Exojuice for exosome purification with a simple step by a combination of zonal and density gradient. All these inventions have enabled his team to achieve the treatment of liver cancer, lung cancer, brain cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer; stomach cancer, and prostate cancer in preclinical trials. He founded the ExonanoRNA LLC which is actively working toward clinical trials for the treatment of these cancers. Dr. Guo has received many honors including the Pfizer Distinguished Faculty Award, Purdue Faculty Scholar Award, Lions Club Cancer Research Award, Purdue Seed Award, University of Cincinnati Research Award, and was named the “Innovator of the Year” by OSU in April of 2021. He has been recognized as a Distinguished Alumni of the University of Minnesota, Distinguished Chinese Alumni of the University of Minnesota during its 100-year celebration; Dr. Guo is an editor or editorial board member of 7 different scientific journals and has been featured numerous times by TV such as ABC and NBC, and by media outlets of NIH, NSF, MSNBC, NCI, and ScienceNow, etc. He was previously a member of two prominent National Nanotechnology Initiatives by NSF, NIH, National Council of Nanotechnology and NIST; two NIH steering committees in NDC and Extracellular RNA; the Selection Committee of the 2019-2020 Lifetime Achievement Award for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

As ATUM’s Co-Founder and CCO, Dr. Gustafsson oversees most of the company's external communications. Prior to co-founding ATUM, he led, managed and collaborated with key strategic teams at Maxygen Inc. Before Maxygen, he was a scientist at Kosan Biosciences, a number of research, teaching, and post-doctoral positions at UCs Santa Cruz and San Francisco, and University of UmeA. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology/Biochemistry from the University of UmeA, Sweden.

• Engineering Antibodies

Dr. Matias Gutierrez is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the lab of Dr. Brandon DeKosky at the University of Kansas. Dr. Gutierrez’s graduate research studied the development and characterization of biopharmaceuticals, with a focus on monoclonal antibodies. Currently, Dr. Gutierrez works to develop new tools for bioinformatic analysis of single-cell antibody repertoire data, and to establish new techniques for high-throughput B cell sequencing.

• TS10B: Analysis and Interpretation of Antibody Deep Sequencing and Single Cell Analysis Data

Ben Hackel is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He earned degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin (B.S., advised by Eric Shusta) and MIT (PhD, advised by Dane Wittrup) and performed postdoctoral research in the radiology department at Stanford University (Sam Gambhir). Since its inception, the Hackel lab has applied protein engineering technologies to develop physiological molecular targeting agents for molecular diagnostics and targeted therapy, with a focus on oncology and infectious disease.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Trevor J. Hallam, Ph.D., has served as our Chief Scientific Officer since December 2010. Prior to joining us, Dr. Hallam was Executive Vice President of Research & Development at Palatin Technologies, Inc., and held several senior management positions in various pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca PLC, SmithKline & French Laboratories, Ltd., Glaxo Group Research Ltd., Roche Research and Rhone-Poulenc Rorer. Dr. Hallam received a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry from the University of Leeds and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Kings College, University of London. He then conducted post-doctoral training at the Physiological Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Sara is the global head of molecular technologies at Alloy Therapeutics. She leads design and execution of a high-throughput molecular biology platform, supporting a variety of DNA formats to empower Alloy's partners in their drug discovery efforts. Sara is experienced in bispecific antibody engineering, affinity maturation & molecular/cell biology platform development, having previously worked for Aveo Oncology, 121Bio & Compass Therapeutics. She has an MSc in Nutritional Biochemistry from Tufts University.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Seth Harris is a Director of Computational Structural Biology and Distinguished Scientist at Genentech. After graduate work with Dr. Mike Botchan at UC Berkeley determining structures of a viral transcription and replication factor, Seth did postdoctoral research on the structure and function of Hsp90 at UCSF with Dr. David Agard. He then joined the Structural Biology group at Roche Palo Alto, supporting diverse structure-based drug design projects. Since 2010 he has been at Genentech, continuing to expand his research across numerous projects with an increasing emphasis on computational and informatics methods to transform structure-based research and drug discovery.

• Engineering Antibodies

Christian Hentrich is a Senior Scientist at Bio-Rad AbD Serotec, working with the R&D team to create new products. His interests include antibody engineering, in vitro evolution, bioinformatics, and machine learning. Christian earned his PhD from EMBL Heidelberg and Heidelberg University and completed a postdoc at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital.

• Display of Biologics

Master in Analytical Chemistry with 15+ years of Mass Spectrometry experience. Currently, I provide in-house and CRO support for in vivo and in vitro studies including PK, TK, and biotransformation analysis at the Biochemical and Cellular Pharmacology department at Genentech. This involves a wide variety of sample preparation approaches, as well as ESI (QTrap, Orbitrap, TOF) and MALDI techniques for MS data acquisition.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Dr. Hernandez-Lopez is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and of Genetics at Stanford University, a member of Stanford Bio-X, and a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. Rogelio received his PhD in Chemical Physics at Harvard University, where he worked in the Leschziner Lab on the mechanisms of the microtubule-based motors dynein and kinesin. During his postdoctoral research in the lab of Wendell Lim at UCSF, Rogelio was a fellow of the Cancer Research Institute and UCMEXUS. His work focused on engineering novel T cell therapies for cancer treatment. Rogelio was a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface in 2021 and was named a V Foundation scholar in 2022.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Tim recently joined Roche as Head of Immunosafety to focus on quantitative assessment of immunosafety risks. Tim previously lead Pfizer's Immunogenicity sciences team, where he contributed to better by design processes for minimizing immunogenicity risk, and spearheaded the industry's efforts to predict immunogenicity through quantitative systems pharmacology modeling of immune responses to biotherapeutics.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Dr. Ho is a Senior Investigator, the Deputy Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the Head of the Antibody Therapy Section, and the Director of the Antibody Engineering Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he generated anti-idiotypic antibodies as cocaine antagonists. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Ira Pastan at the NIH, where he engineered immunotoxins targeting CD22 and mesothelin for the treatment of B cell leukemias and mesothelioma. Dr. Ho's laboratory at the NCI has been studying the biology of cancer driven by cell surface proteins, such as glypicans (e.g. GPC3, GPC2, GPC1) as a new family of tumor antigens, in broad scientific fields of molecular and cellular biology with a focus on ligand/receptor interactions, Wnt/Yap signaling, antibody and protein engineering, structure biology, functional genomics, and cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Ho established mammalian cell surface display and built shark and camel single domain antibody phage libraries as new tools to advance antibody engineering and drug discovery. The immune therapeutics based on his antibodies are being tested at clinical stages for treating liver cancer, neuroblastoma, mesothelioma, and other cancers.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Dr. Hogan received his PhD in Analytical Chemistry from Purdue University focusing on intact protein characterization using mass spectrometry. After working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a proteomics research scientist supporting cancer biomarker discovery, he joined Bristol Myers Squibb in 2010. He currently leads a mass spectrometry group focused on the characterization of protein therapeutics and antibodies to support lead discovery, candidate selection, developability assessment, and epitope characterization to transition molecules to pre-clinical development.

• Biophysical Methods

Dr. Nasheed M. Hossain is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. During his BMT fellowship at Stanford and as an Assistant Professor at Loyola and the University of Pennsylvania, he was instrumental is designing and implementing CAR T clinical protocols and caring for CAR T patients. Dr. Hossain’s research focuses on understanding the factors leading to improving the safety of CAR T cells while retaining their therapeutic efficacy. Dr. Hossain’s research also focuses on leveraging insights in T-cell biology on the prevention and treatment of Graft versus Host Disease in Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplant patients.

• SC8: CAR T Cells: Improving Safety While Retaining Therapeutic Activity

Dr. Fei Hua is a trained biologist and systems modeler with over 10 years of drug discovery and development experience, working in a variety of disease areas with both large and small molecules. She previously worked at Pfizer Inc. in non-clinical groups to build systems biology models and later as a clinical pharmacology lead where she established the first example of applying QSP models to address clinical development questions for the group.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Dr. Possu Huang received his PhD from Caltech with the first demonstration of a computationally designed novel protein-protein interface. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington before starting his group at Stanford. His research focuses on advancing the understanding of proteins for the engineering of novel therapeutics and other protein-based nanotechnology. He has contributed to a large number of de novo designed proteins, most notably to the unlocking of the design principles behind the TIM barrel fold. His group uses computational modeling, structural biology and experimental library optimization to continue the expansion of protein-based molecular platforms, as well as creating new design tools with modern neural network architectures.

• Display of Biologics

Univ. Prof. Dr. med. Michael Hudecek performed medical training at the University of Leipzig, Germany, where he also commenced his specialist training in hematology and oncology. In 2007, Michael joined the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle as a post-doctoral research fellow, where he trained in the laboratory of Prof. Stanley R. Riddell and worked on identifying and validating novel tumor antigens in hematologic malignancies, the design and functional optimization of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) constructs, as well as defining optimal cellular compositions of CAR T-cell products. In 2012, Michael was recruited to the Universitatsklinikum Wurzburg, Germany, where he established a translational research program on CAR T-cell immunotherapy. At present, this program comprises physicians, scientists, doctoral students, master students and technicians in a multidisciplinary, international team that performs cutting-edge research with focus on novel transformative CAR technologies, and first-in-man clinical application of novel CAR-T products. Michael is an extraordinary member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and recipient of the 2017 Artur Pappenheim Award of the German Society for Hematology and Medical Oncology.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

I am a PhD biochemist with over 12 years of experience in pharmaceutical companies and academia. My research has focused on functional characterization of novel format antibodies, engineered proteins, as well as AAVs for the delivery of novel cargos. Over the years I have worked on the design and functional assessment of antibodies with diverse mechanisms of action, such as immune cell engagers, ADCs, stromal targeting multi-specific antibodies, targeted radioligand therapies, cytokine grafts, and others. I have served as a project champion for multiple large molecule programs, managing milestones from target ideation to lead selection and development. In addition to my experience in protein engineering and assay development, I have contributed to the development of sophisticated cell-surface receptor characterization techniques that were used to identify and validate novel large molecule targets, and that have also resulted in a number of high impact publications.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Dr. Hwang obtained her PhD at Seoul National University, studying the use of phage display technology in developing novel antibody-based cancer therapeutics and medical imaging tools. Afterward, she joined The Scripps Research Institute in 2017 as a postdoctoral associate, where she continued to work in the field of antibody therapy, specifically on the development of next-generation antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Her approaches are geared towards the development of new conjugation technologies for site-specific ADC design and new antibody carriers to improve tumor tissue penetration.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Nageatte Ibrahim is a Vice President of Clinical Research at Merck and oversees the Melanoma, Innovative Strategies, and GI Tumor teams in her capacity as Therapeutic Area Section Head as well as holds a leadership role in the Merck and Astra-Zeneca Alliance. Nageatte has held roles of increasing responsibility over the years at Merck and has a deep interest in advancing effective therapeutics for cancer patients and understanding biologic drivers for enriching responses. Her work and leadership in the clinical development program lead to the expansion of indications, notably, the initial full approval of Keytruda in advanced melanoma worldwide, the first approval for Keytruda in the adjuvant setting for resected stage III melanoma, moving in an earlier disease setting resected stage IIB and IIC melanoma, advanced Merkel Cell Carcinoma and a tumor-agnostic approval for patients with high tumor mutational burden .) cancers, are a few of her accomplishments. In addition, Nageatte also leads the cross-functional integration team for the clinical development of Merck’s anti-CTLA-4 antibody, quavonlimab, and the anti-LAG3 antibody, favezelimab. Prior to joining Merck, Nageatte was a clinical director at GSK, where she participated in the full approval filings for dabrafenib and trametinib in metastatic melanoma. Nageatte did her hematology/oncology training at Tufts Medical Center in Boston with research work focused on melanoma and mutational drivers, was a clinical research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and then an attending physician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the Melanoma Center and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, with an appointment of Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Nageatte is passionate about teaching and mentoring, and in particular, mentoring women in medicine and pharma. Outside of her dedicated career to clinical research, Nageatte enjoys traveling to new places and immersing herself in the local culture and cuisine, taking photos, spending time with family and friends, and gardening.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

I completed my PhD in membrane protein biochemistry at the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, University of Leeds, UK in the laboratory of Professor Peter Henderson, studying the molecular mechanisms of bacterial secondary active transporters. In 2013 I started a Postdoc at ETH Zurich, Switzerland in the laboratory of Professor Kaspar Locher, studying the structure and function of human multidrug transporters. I purified human ABCG2 in membrane mimetic environments, developed radioligand binding and transport assays, and helped determine numerous anti-cancer drug-bound cryo-EM structures. In 2019, I moved to Astex Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, UK, to start a Research Associate position in the department of Molecular Sciences. I have been an Exploratory Target Lead since April 2021 and a Senior Research Associate since April 2022. I have utilized X-ray crystallography to support a fragment-based drug discovery project and I have optimized the expression and purification of human membrane protein targets for high-resolution structure determination by cryo-EM to enable structure-based drug discovery.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Michael is a founding Partner at Cambridge Biostrategy Associates, LLC (CBA). With over 20 years’ industry and consulting experience, Michael has a strong business, scientific and technical background as well as pharmaceutical product development experience. He has led multiple engagements in the areas of pharmaceutical development and commercialization, contract services, diagnostics, medical devices, and life science tools. Product areas include oncology, immunology, bleeding disorders, cardiovascular, psychiatry, surgical devices, molecular diagnostics, and pathology. In addition, he has extensive experience in corporate and product strategy; new product development; and partnering, market entry, geographic, and market access strategies.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Darshana Jani is Head of Global Bioanalytical Sciences at ModernaTx. Prior to that, she served as a Director at Agenus and Scientific Associate Director at Pfizer, Cambridge, MA, USA, where her role was to serve as scientific and technical lead for both CROs and internal teams for development, validation, and application of bioanalytical and biomarker assays to comply with scientific and regulatory requirements. She has over 25 years of experience in supporting preclinical to clinical studies holding positions with Sanofi, MedImmune, Biogen, and Pfizer. She has risen from the ranks, at the outset developing and applying bioanalytical methods, while assuming numerous responsibilities germane to regulatory compliance of the validation and application of group procedure. She has also guided bioanalytical lab groups held responsible for overseeing any and all phases of drug recovery and development; a task which incorporated product characterization, potency determination, immunogenicity testing, as well as surrogate biomarker assay development, validation, and sample testing. Lastly, she has published several recommendation white papers with industry, academic, and regulatory peers in the area of biomarkers, as well as immunogenicity.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Jan Jezek is the Chief Scientific Officer at Arecor Ltd. He has been trained as a biophysical chemist. He was the principal scientist at Insense Ltd, leading the development of a range of novel medical devices from the proof-of-concept all the way to market. During his time at Insense, he and his team developed a novel formulation platform to achieve superior stability of proteins and other biological molecules. His inventions related to protein stabilization led to inception of Arecor Ltd as a separate company focusing on commercialization and further development of the stabilization platform.

• SC2: Introduction to Lipid Nanoparticle Characterization and Formulation

Peter Johnson is a Field Applications Scientist Manager for the Biologics Business unit at ProteinSimple. He joined Bio-Techne in 2019, and prior to that held FAS roles at Precision Nanosystems, Li-Cor Biosciences and Incyte Genomics.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Colette has over 11 years’ experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, with a strong focus on transgenic platforms and antibody discovery. She has been at Crescendo since 2012. Prior to joining Crescendo, Colette held a senior scientific role in Antibody Discovery and Protein Engineering at MedImmune. Before her industrial career she was an academic research scientist, interested in epigenetic control of gene regulation (MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, London), VDJ recombination and B cell development (Babraham Institute, Cambridge) and X chromosome dosage compensation (Welcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge). Colette holds a BSc degree in Biology from Manchester University, an MSc in Molecular Genetics from Leicester University and a PhD in Developmental Biology from King’s College London.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Dr. June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and is currently Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. The CAR T cells invented in the June laboratory were awarded “Breakthrough Therapy” status by the FDA for acute leukemia in children and adults in 2014 and were approved by the FDA for acute leukemia in 2017 and afterwards, for diffuse large B cell lymphoma. These accomplishments have been recognized by the White House on several occasions. He has published more than 500 manuscripts and is the recipient of numerous honors, including election to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy
• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies
• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics
• Difficult-to-Express Proteins
• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety
• Display of Biologics

Co-founder of Samplix and CTO. In charge of the development of instruments, microfluidic cartridges, reagents, and software for single-cell and single-molecule assays including gene edit verification and single-cell phenotypic assays.  PhD in Molecular and Cellular biology and more than 16 years of experience in the life science industry managing development of biochemistry and engineering technology.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

My PhD training was in biophysical characterization of protein-protein interactions and I did a short post-doctoral fellowship looking at small-molecule-protein interactions. Since then, I've characterized biotherapeutics and small molecules and their interactions with the targets using a diverse set of methods.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Alexandros is a researcher working at the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Stockholm University. Since his Ph.D. and through-out his post-doc, Alexandros has focused on answering fundamental questions regarding protein quality control in the cell envelope of E. coli and how to use this information to enhance recombinant protein production. Part of his work is directed to identifying and solving the bottlenecks hampering protein production in E. coli and has resulted in the development of an easy-to-use and accessible platform to customize E. coli for protein production. Currently, the stage is being set to commercialize the platform.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Sukru currently leads the IT organization at AbbVie’s multiple sites in Massachusetts with two teams focused on research informatics supporting early R&D and biologics development/CMC. At Abbott/AbbVie for over 10 years, he started in the discovery organization focused on data and bioinformatics supporting biologics research and ultimately transitioned to the information research R&D IT organization in 2016. His prior experiences and roles span across the bench and clinical sciences as well as IT, software engineering, and data science. Sukru has a B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a M.S. in Bioinformatics, both from Boston University.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Patrik joined Glycotope in 2012. His work focused on the engineering of bispecific antibody constructs and lead discovery. As a specialist in immunology, he was subsequently responsible for the establishment of the Immuno-Oncology group at Glycotope with its broad pipeline on bispecific constructs. Patrik left Glycotope in 2018 and joined Medigene to work on the development of next-generation adoptive T cell therapies. Since 2020, Patrik has been responsible for the business development and program management at Glycotope and was appointed as CSO in February 2022. He holds a degree in biology from the Julius Maximilian University of Wuerzburg and a Dr.rer.med. from the Charite Comprehensive Cancer Center.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Brenna Kelley-Clarke is a Virologist whose focus is developing viral vectors for gene delivery in immune-oncology. At BMS, Brenna leads multiple teams focused on process and analytical development for AAV and lentiviral vectors, as well as non-viral approaches for gene delivery. Her team's passion is delivering more vector, better vector, and more better vector to cell and gene therapy patients.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Andreas joined LenioBio in 2022 as a member of the System Innovation Team.

A biochemist by training, Andreas has extensive experience of protein design, expression and purification, both in the ALiCE cell-free system and other expression systems. He received his PhD in biochemistry from the University if Leeds, where he focused on the structural elucidation of bacterial membrane proteins. Andreas has published extensively on membrane proteins and other difficult-to-express proteins.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Philip M. Kim is a Professor at Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto. He leads a research laboratory that integrates machine learning, physics-based modeling and wet/experimental methods for engineering of biologics. He is a Co-founder of Resolute Bio, a drug development startup company. He authored over 70 publications, 7 invention disclosures and 3 patent applications. Before to setting up his lab in 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University where he pioneered structural analyses of protein interactions networks and an associate with McKinsey & Co. He holds a Ph.D. from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Biochemistry and Physics from the University of Tuebingen.

• SC3: In silico and Machine Learning Tools for Antibody Design and Developability Predictions

Dr. Yong-Sung Kim has been a professor in the Department of Molecular Science and Technology at Ajou University (Suwon, Korea) since 2004. Dr. Kim obtained his M.Sc. in biotechnology in 1998 from KAIST (Daejon, Korea) and PhD in pharmaceutical sciences in 2002 from the University of Colorado, Denver, USA. He did a post-doc in Professor K. Dane Wittrup’s lab at MIT. He also spent one year (2010-2011) during his Sabbatical at Genentech, Inc. (SF, USA). Dr. Kim’s research focuses on the development of therapeutic antibody platform technology, including heterodimeric Fc-based bispecific antibodies and immunocytokines, and cytosol-penetrating antibodies. Dr. Kim has published more than 110 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and filed/obtained numerous domestic and international patents (= 100 patents). Dr. Kim co-founded Orum Therapeutics, Inc. in 2016, and Pinetree Therapeutics, Inc. (Boston, USA) in 2019. In addition, Dr. Kim has transferred 5 antibody-related technologies to companies in Korea and USA. His website is http://antibody.ajou.ac.kr/.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Dr. Anne (Hai-Young) Kim is a Senior Principal Scientist and Biophysical Characterization Group Leader at Mass Spectrometry and Biophysical Characterization (MSBC) laboratory, a part of the Analytical Research & Development in the BioTherapeutics Pharmaceutical Sciences (BioTxPS) at Pfizer. In her current role, she leads the group to apply heightened characterization and develop innovative analytical methods for well-characterized biotherapeutics. Her team supports many projects within Pfizer's Biotherapeutics portfolio including early- and late-stage molecules ranging from antibodies, recombinant proteins, and conjugated vaccines to mRNA. Her research interests include higher-order structure, protein stability, biophysical characterization of proteins, protein-protein interactions, and protein-small molecule interactions using NMR and other biophysical techniques. Anne received her PhD in chemistry from Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany, and her M.S./B.S in biochemistry from Yonsei University, S. Korea.

• Biophysical Methods

Seahee Kim leads cell line development at Samsung Biologics and has developed over 60 cell line development projects successfully. Before joining Samsung Biologics in 2017, she led a biology lab research team at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and was responsible for personalized cancer medicine, as well as DNA diagnostics research. She received her Ph.D. in molecular virology from Yonsei University in South Korea and post-doctoral training in biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Christian Klein, Distinguished Scientist, is Head of Oncology Programs and Department Head Cancer Immunotherapy Discovery 3 at the Roche Innovation Center Zurich (Roche Pharma Research & Early Development, pRED). Since 06/2019 he also acts as Site Head of RICZ. He specialized in the discovery, engineering, validation and preclinical development of therapeutic (bispecific) antibodies for cancer immunotherapy. During his 18-year tenure at Roche he has made major contributions to the preclinical development and approvals of GAZYVA(RO) (obinutuzumab, GA101), and to the preclinical development of 19 bispecific antibodies, immunocytokines and antibody fusion proteins entering clinical trials. He led research teams developing Roche’s novel bispecific antibody technologies, e.g., the CrossMAb technology and the immunocytokine and T cell bispecific antibody platforms. He obtained his diploma in biochemistry from University Tubingen and his doctorate in biochemistry from Technical University Munich. In 2017 he completed his habilitation in Biochemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich, and since then is an external lecturer there.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies
• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Emilee gained her PhD in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology from the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of Prof. Charles Rinaldo, identifying immune responses to lytic infection with Human Herpes Virus-8.  She joined ProImmune in 2013 after completing her Post Doc in Rinaldo’s lab. She works on the ProImmune team providing innovative solutions for clients that radically improve our understanding of both desired and unwanted immune responses.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Patrick is a Senior Scientist at 23andMe Therapeutics where he leads a team which focuses on therapeutic antibody discovery and engineering for various disease areas. He has more than 10 years of experience in the field. After obtaining a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Heidelberg, Patrick did his postdoctoral work at Genentech focusing on using deep sequencing data for antibody affinity maturation and specificity engineering. He also worked at Stemcentrx (later Abbvie) where he focused on antibody discovery for ADC applications and designed and optimized bispecific formats.

• Engineering Antibodies

JT received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of California Berkeley where he developed novel protein engineering strategies for viral gene therapy. He then completed a post-doc with Jim Wells at the University of California San Francisco where he developed a novel structure-based design platform to generate phospho-specific antibodies. He currently leads a team at Genentech in the Department of Antibody Engineering focused on collaboratively discovering novel biology and transformative drugs. His group seeks to advance new therapies to patients through the development of new technologies to aid in target discovery, drug challenging targets, and overcoming drug delivery barriers.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Shohei Koide, PhD, is a synthetic protein scientist. His research integrates structure-guided design and directed evolution to create highly functional, but still simple, proteins. He is the inventor of the FN3 Monobody technology, and he has made important contributions to synthetic antibody technologies and to the application of synthetic binding proteins to biology, chemistry, and medicine. His current research focuses on the discovery of cancer therapeutics and on establishing strategies to control "undruggable" targets. Previously, he was Professor at University of Chicago and at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

No bio available.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Dr. Koretz holds a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Tulane University for her work on biophysical characterization of adenosine receptors. During her post-doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University, she continued to characterize GPCRs using both cell-based assays and biophysical techniques in Anne Skaja Robinson's laboratory. Dr. Koretz is presently a Protein Biophysicist at Eli Lilly and Co.

• Biophysical Methods

Dr. Kreitman received his MD from Ohio State University in 1985 and training in Internal Medicine at Duke University Medical Center from 1985 to 1988. He completed a fellowship in Medical Oncology at the National Institutes of Health, where he has remained working in the development of new recombinant biologic therapies for Cancer. He now is Chief of the Clinical Immunotherapy Section of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the National Cancer Institute. He directs both clinical and laboratory research teams testing and developing recombinant immunotoxins for hematologic malignancies. He also studies the biology of hairy cell leukemia, which is particularly sensitive to immunotoxins, and directs clinical trials of these and other agents for hairy cell leukemia.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Rachel Kroe-Barrett has 25 years of experience in both small and large molecule discovery. Currently she is an Executive Director in Biotherapeutics Discovery at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. Rachel is leading the Digital Transformation efforts for Biotherapeutics at BI.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Michelle Kuhne is an immunologist with over 20 years of industry experience ranging from small biotech to large pharma. She started her career in immuno-oncology at Medarex when nivolumab/Opdivo was still in preclinical development. During her time at Medarex and then at Bristol-Myers Squibb, she successfully led the pre-clinical development of several human monoclonal antibodies from concept to drug candidate selection and first-in-human clinical trials. Currently she is senior director of immuno-oncology research at Gilead Sciences where she is building a portfolio of small and large molecule therapeutics for oncology.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Vinodh Kurella is a Senior Scientist (Biologics computational modeler) in Biotherapeutic Engineering Group (BE) within Global Biologics at Takeda (Cambridge, USA). Experienced in structure-based antibody/protein design and optimization. Previously had range experiences at various biotech companies in different modalities such as gene therapy, biologics, and CAR T designs. Post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School/Dana Farber in Dr. Wayne Marasco laboratory in antibody engineering and graduate training from Louisiana State University (LSU-HSC) in the field of protein X-ray crystallography in David Worthylake laboratory.

• SC3: In silico and Machine Learning Tools for Antibody Design and Developability Predictions

Research in the Lai Lab is at the interface of mucus, immunology, nanotechnology, biomaterials, biophysics, bioengineering, and modeling, with active work in five primary areas: (1) antibody engineering for mucosal applications; (2) elucidating adaptive immune response (i.e. induction of antibodies) against nanomaterials; (3) engineering of bispecific antibodies for immunomodulation of the tumor microenvironment; (4) targeted editing of immune cells; and (5) phage engineering for gene therapy of the microbiome. Lai’s previous research focused on nanoparticle-based delivery of bioactive molecules to mucosal tissues. He helped pioneer the development of mucus-penetrating particle technology, a breakthrough that formed the basis of Kala Pharmaceuticals, launched in 2009. Kala completed its IPO in 2017, and has two FDA-approved drugs based on the technology. His prior inventions have also been licensed by Graybug Vision, which completed its IPO in 2020 and is in late stage clinical development. Since moving to UNC, he has established a rigorous research program at the interface of engineering, immunology, biophysics, and biomaterials. His lab has spun out a number of startups. His pioneering work on muco-trapping antibodies led to the formation of Mucommune, LLC, a startup focused on harnessing antibody-mucin interactions for female reproductive health, and Inhalon Biopharma, a clinical stage company focused on treating acute respiratory infections. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his research, including the NSF CAREER Award and the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies
• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Jason is the head of lead optimization platforms at Alloy Therapeutics. He leads development and execution of display-based protein engineering platforms to empower the Alloy ecosystem of partners in their drug discovery efforts. Jason is experienced in antibody library design, phage and yeast display screening, and next-generation sequencing, having previously worked for Compass Therapeutics & TCR² Therapeutics. He has a PhD in Chemical & Biological Engineering from the University of Wisconsin Madison.

• Display of Biologics

Dr. Lambert graduated from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge (England, UK), with a degree in Natural Sciences in 1972. He then went on to earn a Ph.D. in Biochemistry (1976) from the University of Cambridge, working on enzyme structures under the supervision of Professor Richard N. Perham. Dr Lambert’s postdoctoral training was at the University of California, Davis, working on ribosome structure in the laboratory of Dr Robert R. Traut (1976-1980), and at the University of Glasgow, Scotland working on the arom multienzyme complex in the laboratory of Dr John R. Coggins (1980-1982). In 1982, Dr. Lambert joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, working on the ImmunoGen-funded programs to develop antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and immunotoxins as anti-cancer therapeutics. Dr. Lambert joined ImmunoGen in 1987 when the company established independent research laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After working in a variety of roles at the company, Dr. Lambert served as Chief Scientific Officer from 2008 until 2015. In 2016, he became a Distinguished Research Fellow at the company until his retirement at the end of 2017. He served on the Executive Committee of the company as Executive Vice President, Research, from 2008 until 2016, followed by a year (2017) on the Executive Committee in an Emeritus capacity. During Dr Lambert’s tenure in leadership roles at ImmunoGen, the company invented the ADC technology that resulted in the Genentech/Roche drug, Kadcyla® (approved in 2013 for treating HER2+ breast cancer), as well as numerous other ADCs taken into clinical development. One of these is ImmunoGen’s promising drug candidate, mirvetuximab soravtansine, an ADC currently in a phase 3 trial for the treatment of platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. Dr Lambert is the author/co-author of over 120 peer-reviewed scientific publications. In 2016, Dr Lambert was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). In 2018, he was appointed as an Honorary Professor of Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Christopher James Langmead is the Director of Digital Biologics Discovery at Amgen. His team at Amgen develops and uses AI/ML methods to design and optimize of biologics. He earned his PhD in computer science from Dartmouth and then spent the next 18 years as faculty in computer science and computational biology at Carnegie Mellon University where his group developed a variety of generative models relevant to protein design, including GREMLIN. Dr. Langmead joined Amgen at the beginning of 2022.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering
• SC3: In silico and Machine Learning Tools for Antibody Design and Developability Predictions

David Lansky has been practicing statistics on bioassays (and other non-clinical applications in Pharma) for 30 years. This includes Searle/Monsanto/Pharmacia (10 years) and as the owner of Precision Bioassay, Inc. (since 2002). David has been and is still an active participant in the work to revise the USP bioassay chapters. His education includes a year of Electrical and Computer Engineering (University of Michigan), a BS in Botany (San Francisco State), an MS in Entomology (Cornell) and finally both an MS and Ph.D. in Biometry (both Cornell).

• TS7C: Introduction to Bioassay Design, Development, Analysis, Validation, and Monitoring

The Larman laboratory develops and deploys novel molecular assays to improve our understanding of human immune responses. Our approaches integrate concepts in synthetic biology with high throughput sample handling and highly multiplexed measurements coupled to DNA sequencing. The ultimate goal of the lab is to improve our understanding of human immunity in health and diverse disease states by capturing unbiased immune profiles at cohort scale. In collaboration with clinical investigators, we profile the binding specificities of serum antibodies via bacteriophage displayed proteomic libraries (PhIP-Seq) or via Molecular Indexing of Proteins by Self-Assembly (MIPSA). We have also developed an ultra-efficient T cell and B cell receptor repertoire sequencing technology (FR3AK-seq) and a highly multiplexed pathogen detection system called capture RNA-mediated Annealing, Selection and Ligation with next generation Sequencing (cRASL-Seq).

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

My research interests encompass various machine learning applications to antibody and nanobody discovery and design including protein language models, protein structure prediction and docking, surface-based design, sequence library design, and NGS repertoire mining. I received my PhD in Physics at Harvard University.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Mat is a co-founder and CEO (as of December 2022) of OverT Bio, an NYC-based cell and gene therapy. Previously, Mat was a Hope Funds Fellow at the lab of Neville Sanjana at NYU and the NY Genome Center where he developed high-throughput approaches to discover novel regulators of the immune response. Mat holds a B.Sc. from the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and a PhD in Cancer Immunology from Cardiff University, UK.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Viktor Lemgart is a Research Fellow at Tidal Therapeutics, a Sanofi Company, leading the development of novel chimeric antigen receptors. With an engineering background from the Technical University of Denmark, Viktor is focused on designing and testing novel CAR constructs that can be used in Tidal's targeted LNP-mRNA platform.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Tom Lerch earned his PhD from Northwestern University, where he determined crystal structures of protein signaling complexes involved in reproductive health. His postdoctoral research at Oregon Health and Science University helped elucidate receptor interaction sites on AAV gene therapy vectors. At Pfizer, Tom leads an analytical biochemistry line focused on clinical development of mRNA vaccines, gene therapy vectors, and complex protein therapeutics.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Ruojia Li leads the Quantitative Sciences group within the Biologics Development organization at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Her team supports CMC statistics, data science, clinical method performance monitoring, and digital efforts. Ruojia holds a Bachelor in Mathematics from Peking University, and a PhD in Statistics from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Dr. Bowen Li is a tenure-stream Assistant Professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto and is a nominee for Canada Research Chair in RNA Vaccines and Therapeutics. He earned his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Washington, Seattle, and completed a Postdoc Fellowship in the Professors Daniel Anderson and Bob Langer labs at MIT. He has published nearly 40 peer-reviewed papers on Nat. Biotech., Nat. Med., Nat. Comm., Sci. Adv., Adv. Mater., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., ACS Nano, Nano Lett. etc., which have been cited over 1900 times with H-index 25. Since starting his independent lab in 2022, he has received the Gairdner Early Career Investigator Award, the J. P. Bickell Foundation Medical Research Award, the Connaught New Researcher Award, and the UofT New Initiative and Innovation Award.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Yi Li, VP of Strategic Development, Head of Antibody Discovery, XtalPi has an educational background in biology and business. Yi has worked at the intersection of technology and life sciences for the past years, heading up entrepreneurial efforts at various companies that utilize AI and robotics to solve real-world problems.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Dr. Yu Liang holds a Ph.D. in Virology/Microbiology from the University of Chicago and completed postdoctoral training at NIAID, NIH. With over 20 years of experience in biomedical sciences, Dr. Liang has worked in both academia and industry, serving as a PI/lab head at Novartis Inst. for Biomedical Research, Senior Project Leader, and Portfolio Director at WuXi Biologics Discovery. He currently serves as VP for R&D at GenScript ProBio, specializing in the discovery of therapeutic modalities based on therapeutic Abs (mAbs, BsAbs, ADCs, etc.) for cell and gene therapy, vaccines, and antibody protein drugs.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Charlene Liao, Ph.D., co-founded Immune-Onc Therapeutics and has served as its President and Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors since May 2016. Charlene has 25 years of industry experience in drug development and business leadership. From 2002-2016, Charlene held global drug development roles at Genentech where she was instrumental in leading development efforts across the product lifecycle for ten new molecular entities (NMEs) in a variety of therapeutic areas including: hematology-oncology, oncology, immunology, infectious diseases, and metabolic disorders. Prior to joining Genentech, Charlene was a Director of Business Development at Rigel. She began her career in biotech as a scientist at Tularik, before its acquisition by Amgen. Charlene received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in the laboratory of famed biologist Dr. Michael Rosbash, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Charlene completed her postdoctoral research in immunology at UCSF where she was a Fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fund in the laboratory of Dr. Dan Littman and a Special Fellow of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) in the laboratory of Dr. Art Weiss.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Dr. Tony Lim is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge, researching the use of self-amplifying RNA to express analgesic spider venom peptides in situ for joint pain relief. He obtained his MSc and PhD at McGill University, where he studied the mechanisms of low back pain and neuropathic pain.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Dr. Qingcong Lin is SVP of Biocytogen and CEO of Biocytogen Boston Corporation. Dr. Lin focuses on Biocytogen’s global business development for antibody discovery services, RenMab licensing, gene targeting services and humanized mice for assessing preclinical efficacy/toxicity of therapeutic antibodies. Dr. Lin's expertise spans oncology, neurology, & immunology fields, and various technologies, such as genetically engineered mice, therapeutic antibody engineering, affinity maturation and optimization. 

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Emma Lind is the Global Product Manager for Cytiva’s chromatography resins and is responsible for research and process development products based in Uppsala, Sweden. Emma holds degrees in Bioscience from the University of North Carolina and an MBA from Stockholm University. She has more than 20 years of experience in the biopharma and biotech industries and has been with Cytiva since 2015, focusing on developing and providing innovative chromatography solutions to researchers and process development customers. Originally from North Carolina, she currently resides in Sweden.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Troy Lionberger is the Senior Vice President of Partnerships & Services at PhenomeX. He received a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, followed by postdoctoral training in Biophysics at UC Berkeley. Troy was an early scientist at Berkeley Lights, where he innovated solutions for therapeutic applications of the Berkeley Lights screening platform.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Wenshe Ray Liu (Texas A&M University) is the Harry E. Bovay, Jr. Endowed Chair and Professor in Chemistry at Texas A&M University. He earned his B.S. degree from Peking University in 2000 and his PhD degree under the direction of Professor Michael D. Toney from UC-Davis in 2005. He finished a two-year postdoc training with Professor Peter G. Schultz in the Scripps Research Institute and started his independent research career in 2007 at Texas A&M University as assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 2013 and then full professor in 2016. Professor Liu was the inaugural holder of the Emile & Marta Schweikert Professorship from 2014 to 2018, Gradipore Chair in Chemistry from 2018 to 2022, and the inaugural holder of the Harry E. Bovay, Jr. Endowed Chair in Chemistry since 2022 at Texas A&M University. He previously directed the TAMU Chemistry Mass Spectrometry Laboratory and is currently serving as the director of the Texas A&M Drug Discovery Laboratory. The focus of his research is to invent novel chemical biology techniques to study posttranslational modifications of chromatin and build generally applied platforms for the identification of therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases. Professor Liu is a longtime advocate of diversity and inclusiveness in research and has been committed to train underrepresented students. He has also co-led a training program for postdocs with diverse backgrounds.

• Display of Biologics

No bio available.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

No bio available.

• mRNA Therapeutics

J. Christopher Love is the Raymond A. (1921) and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering and member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. His research focuses on advancing next-generation approaches for accessible and affordable biomanufacturing and on single-cell analyses in chronic diseases like cancer and food allergy. He served as a Distinguished Engineer in Residence at Biogen in 2015 and is the founding director of the Alternative Host Research Consortium at MIT. He has also co-founded four companies for biopharmaceutical services and technologies, including Honeycomb Bio, OneCyte Bio, and Sunflower Therapeutics.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Patrick is Vice President of Research at Synthekine and has served as head of the Protein Sciences department since the company’s formation in 2019. He joined Synthekine after nine years at Genentech, where he was a Senior Scientist and led a group focused on protein structure, production and design that supported both antibody and small molecule drug discovery programs. Patrick is an expert in JAK kinase structural biology, and prior to Genentech was a postdoctoral fellow with Synthekine founder Chris Garcia at Stanford, where he published a number of biochemical and structural studies of cytokine and receptor complexes, including IL-6, IL-13, and IL-23. Patrick obtained his Ph.D. from the Stanford University School of Medicine and a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Bob has been an independent consultant in the biotech/pharma industry since 2015 and has worked with multiple clients providing strategic, tactical and operational input for their research and development efforts. Prior to initiating his consulting practice, Bob held various R&D roles over a 23 year span at ImmunoGen, Inc. In his most recent position at ImmunoGen, Bob was Vice President of Translational Research and Development with responsibility for all early stage antibody drug conjugate (ADC) development programs from lead identification through phase 2. He also served as ImmunoGen’s research lead on Genentech’s FDA-approved trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) program. Before the ADC research position, Bob was part of ImmunoGen’s Apoptosis Technology Inc subsidiary where he led the research collaboration leading to the discovery of the BH3 domain of the BCl-2 family of death regulatory proteins. Before ImmunoGen, Bob was a research and postdoctoral fellow at the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Colorado. He earned his doctoral degree in Biochemistry at Brandeis University.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Dr. Donghui Ma is the founder and CEO of DIMA Biotechnology LTD. Before DIMA, he was the general manager and CSO for several Biotech companies, including OriGene, BioCheck and Juventas. Dr. Ma started DIMA in 2019 to build premade lead antibody molecules for every druggable target using single B cell cloning technology. To date, DIMA has made over 5000 lead antibodies for ~300 targets with verified sequences and testing data. 

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Jad Maamary is the director at immunai where he is employing protein engineering strategies to drive novel therapeutic concepts. Prior to immunai, he worked at Merck and Boehringer-Ingelheim focusing on immune modulation and breaking of tolerance to self epitopes.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Yoan Machado received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Havana, Cuba, in 2007. His research was focused on developing analytical methods for phosphoproteomics. He then joined the Centre for Molecular Immunology as a research scientist working in protein characterization by LC-MS. In 2013, Yoan entered the Immunity Cancer and Allergy international PhD program at the University of Salzburg, Austria. His research focused on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying protein allergenicity. After completing his degree, Yoan joined as a postdoc in the Overall lab at the University of British Columbia. His research utilized N-terminomics and proteomics to study the regulation of proteolytic networks in health and disease including COVID-19. Yoan joined Amgen in 2021 where he is currently a scientist in the Molecular Analytics team at the Centre for research Acceleration by Digital Innovation. His research interests focus on high-throughput MS-based methods for the characterization of large protein panels.

• Biophysical Methods

Bioinformatician with several years of experience in lab automation, software engineering, and data analysis. Working in Roche's Large Molecule Research organization within Pharma Research & Early Development at Roche Innovation Center Munich. Leading and providing lab automation, data processing, and scientific management applications.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

After completing my PhD in Pharmacology in which I developed new biotherapeutics to reduce complications in diabetic patients, I started a post-doc with Dr Yves Durocher to generate a new inducible expression system for the large-scale production of difficult-to-express recombinant proteins. I am currently a research officer and project leader at National Research Council of Canada where I am leading both external projects with clients and internal projects aiming to develop a new founder cell line to generate clonal cell lines by recombinase-mediated cassette exchange.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Biology with a minor in Chemistry at the American University in Cairo/the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (Erasmus exchange program). I was then awarded a Cancer Research UK studentship to conduct a four-year PhD program at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute (CRUKMI) in the Cell Signalling group headed by Prof. Angeliki Malliri. During my PhD, I was involved in dissecting the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer metastasis, the leading cause of death in cancer patients. In particular, my work focused on identifying factors that dictate the biological outcomes downstream of the small GTPase Rac1, a key regulator of cytoskeletal rearrangements and cell migration. I then joined the Dikic group at the Institute of Biochemistry II, Goethe University Frankfurt as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow, where I was working on further elucidating host-pathogen interactions governing Salmonella Typhimurium infection, with a particular focus on the role of cytoskeletal modulators under physiological and pathological conditions. Following my postdoctoral work, I joined the de Sousa e Melo group in the Discovery Oncology department at Genentech, Roche to uncover novel targets and therapeutic avenues for developing effective cancer therapies.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

John Marioni, PhD, is Senior Vice President and Head of Computation at Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED). In this role, Dr. Marioni oversees the development and application of computational approaches across gRED in the biological, chemical and clinical sciences. Previously, Dr. Marioni was Head of Research at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), an Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a Senior Group Leader at the CRUK Cambridge Institute within the University of Cambridge. John's personal research has focused on using computational approaches to study cell fate decisions in normal development and in disease.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy
• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies
• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics
• Difficult-to-Express Proteins
• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety
• Display of Biologics

Debora Marks PhD Marks joined the Systems Biology Department of Harvard as an Assistant Professor in 2014. In 2018, she achieved the rank of Associate Professor. Marks is a mathematician and computational biologist with a track record of developing novel algorithms, statistical methods and machine learning to successfully address unsolved biological problems. She is driven by a passion to understand, predict and design biomolecular systems in a way that impacts biomedical applications and synthetic biology at many scales. Her lab has focused specifically on developing new methods in probabilistic modeling that exploit the huge and increasing corpus of natural and synthetic sequence diversity. Using generative probabilistic models, she continues to build on our early success of predicting 3D structures from sequences alone; Over the past five years she has developed methods that accelerate structural biology with applications to cryoEM, crystallography, protein design and computed 3D structures of thousands of proteins with unknown folds, complexes and RNA interactions as well as flexible, dynamic and even disordered protein ensembles. To address new challenges in protein design Marks has adapted and developed deep neural methods particularly those that have been successful in other areas such as in natural language processing. Marks is applying these for a wide range of applications including (i) designing focused libraries of high affinity, specific nanobodies, antibodies that bypass the need for expensive rounds of selection or labor-intensive specificity assays and (ii) design and prediction of proteins that induce membranes compartmentalization and potentially biostasis in human cells and (iii) predicting the consequences of genetic variation to predict the effect of mutations for disease and drug response. In 2016, Marks won the ICSB Overton Award for outstanding accomplishment in the early to mid stage of career with significant contribution to the field of computational biology, in 2018 the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award in the Neurodegeneration Challenge and in 2020 was awarded NIH Director's Transformative Research Award together with Chang Liu and Andrew Kruse “ Making Antibody Generation Rapid, Scalable, and Democratic Through Machine Learning and Continuous Evolution”

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Dr. Nicholas Marston, MD, MPH is an associate physician in the Cardiovascular Division at Brigham and Women's Hospital, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, an investigator and clinical trialist at the TIMI Study Group, and NIH-funded researcher in genomic medicine. His research interests include novel lipid-lowering therapeutics, the genetics of cardiovascular disease, and translating genomic discovery into clinical practice. He has had leadership roles including principal investigator and national lead investigator in numerous lipid-lowering clinical trials testing genetically validated targets such as PCSK9, ANGPTL3, and APOC3. Clinically, Dr. Marston attends on the inpatient cardiology service and in the Cardiovascular Genetics Center and Preventive Cardiology clinic, where he cares for patients with familial hypercholesterolemia, premature coronary artery disease, and inherited cardiomyopathies and arrhythmias.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Rita Martello received her degrees in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from University of Bologna, Italy, and her PhD in Biology from University of Konstanz, Germany. Rita gained experience in proteomics as postdoctoral fellow at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research in Copenhagen, where she investigated DNA damage repair mechanisms. Finally, she moved to industry (Bayer AG and Sanofi) where she started working in DMPK, developing assays for assessing PK/PD of biologics. Rita is currently DMPK Lead at EMD Serono, deeply involved in the preclinical and clinical evaluation of biologics.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

With 14 years of experience in recombinant protein expression and mammalian cell cultivation, Alexandra holds the position of Project Leader in the Cell Culture Automation department at Selexis. Alexandra graduated from the Polytech French University of Marseille with a Master’s degree in Science and Bioengineering. 

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows

Professor Maynard received her undergraduate degree in Human Biology from Stanford University, followed by a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and post-doctoral studies at Stanford University. She returned to the UT Austin as a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering in 2007. Her research group aims to develop advanced antibody therapeutics to treat infectious diseases, using a combination of biological and engineering principles. Her group has developed antibodies to prevent and treat pertussis and shown that these are highly protective in adolescent and neonatal baboon models of disease. Newer work is focused on strategies to re-direct T cells to eliminate virally-infected cells.

• Engineering Antibodies

Dr. Yariv Mazor is a Senior Director at the department of Biologics Engineering in AstraZeneca. Yariv is leading the Antibody Technology group with 23 reports and co-leads multiple antibody bio-therapeutic programs into clinical development. Yariv received his Ph.D. in Biotechnology from Tel-Aviv University, Israel in 2005, where he studied and developed antibody therapeutics and antibody-drug conjugates for Cancer. He then pursued postdoctoral training at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, TX under Prof. George Georgiou where he developed a novel platform for the selection and screening of engineered full-length IgG antibodies from libraries expressed in E. coli. Yariv is the co-inventor of >10 patents or patent applications and the author of >20 peer-reviewed papers.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

No bio available.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Steve Mehrman, PhD in Organic Chemistry, and has worked 23 years in process development at J&J. He is currently a Scientific Director in the Data Integration and Modeling team as part of Janssen Biotherapeutics Development and an Adjunct Professor at Temple University School of Pharmacy. He has over 50 published patents and 20 publications spanning both large and small molecule focused on automation, technology, and data science to support building control strategies, scale-up, and technical transfer in process development. Steve has defined and implemented a Digital Maturity framework and Model Factory as part of the overall digital transformations ongoing in Janssen. This approach is enabling data to flow within and across project teams supporting explicit knowledge creation through applied data science to achieve both the best process at first launch and accelerated product development.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Werner Meier is CSO of Revitope Oncology, an immuno-oncology company located in Cambridge, MA. The company is developing a new class of cancer therapy called GATEs (Guided Antibody Tumor Engagers) that are designed to elicit a powerful gated immune response focused entirely on the tumor. Prior to joining Revitope, Werner was Vice President, Biologics Drug Discovery at Biogen Idec responsible for the discovery and development readiness of all therapeutic protein candidates in Research. At Biogen he also served as the Program Executive for two development programs aimed at treating immunologic and neurological diseases and successfully guided the programs through preclinical development and manufacturing into early phase clinical studies.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Gerold Meinhardt is currently Vice President, Asset & Portfolio Management, at Daiichi Sankyo, which he joined in June 2020. In this role, he is responsible for the development of Trastuzumab Deruxtecan (DS-8201, ENHERTU), the company’s leading ADC (co-developed with Astra Zeneca), that is already approved for different indications in multiple countries worldwide. Prior to Daiichi Sankyo, he served in different roles at Bayer Pharmaceuticals for over 15 years, most notably as Vice President Clinical Development leading development of the multikinase inhibitors sorafenib and regorafenib. Gerold Meinhardt is a board-certified Medical Oncologist and Hematologist. After graduating from the Medical School at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Germany, he practiced at academic centers for many years and after returning from 3 years as Research Fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, he also led a research laboratory at the University of Munich in parallel to his clinical responsibilities. Gerold Meinhardt has authored over 50 PubMed-listed publications.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Kevin is a Senior Scientist in the Protein Sciences department at Merck in South San Francisco. His research focuses on improving biophysical properties of monoclonal antibodies and new biologic modalities using statistical analysis and machine learning. He received his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, followed by postdoctoral training in protein chemistry and cancer therapy at Northwestern University and the University of California, San Francisco.

• Digital Integration in Biotherapeutic Analytics

Jeffrey S. Miller, MD, received a Bachelor of Science degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and received his MD from Northwestern University School of Medicine. He completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation at the University of Minnesota, he joined the faculty in 1991. Dr. Miller is currently a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, Division of Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation. He is the Deputy Director of the University of Minnesota Masonic Comprehensive Cancer Center. He has more than 20 years of experience studying the biology of NK cells and other immune effector cells and their use in clinical immunotherapy with over 200 peer-reviewed publications. He is a member of numerous societies such as the American Society of Hematology, the American Association of Immunologists, a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation since 1999. He serves on the editorial board for Blood and is a reviewer for a number of journals and NIH grants. Dr. Miller was the recipient of the National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award for 2015.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Nicholas is a Principal Scientist and Head of Protein Engineering at Carisma Therapeutics. He leads a team focused on the design and implementation of novel CARs in Carisma’s CAR-Macrophage platform. Prior to joining Carisma, Nicholas obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania where he developed novel universal immune receptor T cells for cancer therapy.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Dr. Jaime Modiano holds the Alvin and June Perlman Endowed Chair of Animal Oncology and is director of the Animal Cancer Care and Research Program of the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota. He completed his training through the Veterinary Medical Scientist Training Program (VMD, PhD) at the University of Pennsylvania, and he followed it with a residency in Clinical Pathology at Colorado State University and a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine. Before joining the University of Minnesota, he served on the faculties of Texas A&M University and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Dr. Modiano has also worked in the private sector, as founder of Half Moon Bay Biotechnology, LLC, ApopLogic Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Veterinary Research Associates, LLC, and Knine Biotechnology, LLC, and as Director of Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy for the Donald Monk Cancer Research Foundation. Through his research, Dr. Modiano seeks to understand how and why cancer happens and to develop strategies for improving the health and wellbeing of companion animals and humans alike. His research has been supported without interruption by federal and private sources for over 27 years. He has co-authored several hundred scientific papers, abstracts, presentations, and book chapters focused on immunology, cancer biology/genetics, and diagnostic and therapeutic innovations for cancer and immune-mediated diseases. Dr. Modiano is married to Dr. Michelle Ritt, a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine. They share their home with Alsay and Mora, two super cool German Shepherd Dogs.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Fabian Mohr received his Master’s degree in Biology from the Technical Univ. of Munich. During his PhD thesis he worked on the isolation of minimally manipulated regulatory T cells for adoptive T cell therapy. In 2019, Fabian Mohr joined IBA Lifesciences. He currently works as Vice President R&D and is responsible for product & technology innovation.

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows

Deborah joined Abcam in 2019 to lead the Proteins Initiative, which included building out laboratory space and recruiting a team of scientists with skills in protein expression, purification, and assay development. Prior to Abcam, she spent 16 years working in both the reagent and therapeutic spaces. For many years she led Antibody Production at Cell Signaling Technology. 

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Michelle Morrow is Senior Vice President of Biology & Translational Sciences at F-star Therapeutics, overseeing the company’s biology and translational sciences teams’ research activities ranging from discovery through to clinical phase programs. Major achievements during this time include progressing FS118, FS120, and FS222 from candidate selection into the clinic. She also plays a key role as a Project Leader for FS118, a LAG-3/PD-L1 bispecific antibody in Phase II clinical trials. Michelle joined F-star from Medimmune, where she was a Project and Team Leader between 2007-2017 and she successfully established an immuno-oncology preclinical modelling group supporting projects across the Medimmune and AstraZeneca portfolio. She led research project teams for several novel therapies within the Oncology portfolio, including FDA-approved ImfinziTM (durvalumab) and MEDI5752 (PD-1/CTLA-4 bispecific). Michelle received her PhD in Immunology from the University of Cambridge and completed her post-doctoral studies in leukemia research at the Institute of Child Health, London.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

No bio available.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

Ms. Rouba Najjar has specialized in providing scientists with automated solutions that simplify research and development. Currently as the Head of Product Marketing at GenScript Biotech, she has been focused on providing automated solutions and enhanced tools. Passionate about providing automated alternatives that improve research outcomes, her team is generating innovative, reliable, and high quality reagents and instruments that support a wide variety of life science research and development areas.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Dr. Nastri is currently the Associate Vice President, Biotherapeutics at Incyte Corp. His group is responsible for end-to-end discovery and engineering of monoclonal and bispecific antibodies for oncology applications. His group uses both immunization, as well as display approaches for the generation of lead molecules, which are further optimized by a combination of in vitro and in silico approaches. Dr. Nastri started his career in the antibody field at Dyax Corp., where he developed and co-invented key technologies utilized to build the Dyax Fab libraries. He then headed the Antibody Technologies group at EMD Serono, where he implemented new approaches for selecting antibodies by single cell B-cloning and phage display. He became an Inventor of Avelumab, a clinical-approved anti PD-L1 antibody. He joined Pfizer CTI as a Biotherapeutic Site Head in NY, where he collaborated with local academic leaders to enable and advance novel therapeutic programs. During his career, Dr. Nastri became an inventor of multiple antibody therapeutic molecules and antibody discovery enable technologies, while participating in a number of projects resulting in IND applications.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy
• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Christopher Negron is a principal research scientist in the Biologics Discovery Science group at AbbVie's Worcester site. He holds a PhD degree in Computational and Systems Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chris joined AbbVie in 2019 and works on integrating methods from computational structural biology with AbbVie's biologics drug discovery pipeline. Before AbbVie, Christopher worked as an Application Scientist for Schrodinger, helping in the development and dissemination of biologics-oriented modeling workflows.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Dario Neri was born in Rome on 1 May 1963, but grew up in Siena (Italy). He studied Chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and earned a PhD in Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), under the supervision of Professor Kurt Wuthrich (Nobel Prize Chemistry 2002). After a post-doctoral research internship (1992-1996) at the Medical Research Council Centre in Cambridge (UK), under the supervision of Sir Gregory Winter (Nobel Prize Chemistry 2018), he became professor at ETH Zurich in 1996. Dario Neri is currently Full Professor of Biomacromolecules at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zurich. The research of the Neri group focuses on the engineering of therapeutic antibodies for the therapy of cancer and other angiogenesis-related disorders and on the development of DNA-encoded chemical libraries. Dario Neri is a co-founder of Philogen (www.philogen.com), a Swiss-Italian biotech company which has brought various antibody products into multicenter clinical trials for the treatment of cancer and of chronic inflammatory conditions. Dario Neri has published 400 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is the recipient of the ISOBM Abbott Prize 2000, of the Amgen-Dompe’ Biotec Award 2000, of the Mangia d’Oro 2001, of the Prous Award 2006 of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry, of the Robert-Wenner-Prize 2007 of the Swiss Cancer League, of the SWISS BRIDGE Award 2008, of the Prix Mentzer of the French Medicinal Chemistry Society in 2011, of the Phoenix Prize 2014 and of an ERC Advanced Grant in 2015.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Gael completed his M.S in biochemistry, cell and molecular biology at Cornell University in Dr. Pamela Chang's lab. He then joined Affinivax’s discovery division in 2019 to develop novel vaccines using their MAPS technology platform. Gael joined Refeyn in January, 2021 as a sales and applications specialist, where he currently provides support to researchers across the U.S that are using Refeyn’s groundbreaking technology of mass photometry.

• Biophysical Methods

Siwei Nie is a Sr. Director at WuXi Bio, leading biology function to enable clients to discover novel drugs. Siwei received her PhD from UMass in Immunology and Virology, and has over 20 years of drug research experience in immunology and IO.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Dr. Michael I. Nishimura is a Professor in the Department of Surgery at Loyola University Chicago. He has devoted most of the past 30 years of my career to studying TCR genes and developing novel strategies to use them for the purpose of treating patients with advanced malignancies and viral infections. More recently, we have applied our T cell engineering expertise to CAR T cells. We have conducted clinical trials using TCR and CAR T cells. We have objective clinical responses without associated toxicity from the gene modified T cells. Our clinical and laboratory studies are guiding the development of new and safer products for treating cancer patients.

• SC8: CAR T Cells: Improving Safety While Retaining Therapeutic Activity

Graduated in Molecular Immunology in 1992 from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and was trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering in Cambridge until 1995. During this period she developed phage display semi-synthetic human antibody library, the so call ‘Nissim’ library which has been used worldwide. In November 2000 was appointed at Queen Mary University. My studies are interdisciplinary and involve translational research at the William Harvey Research Institute and with intensive worldwide collaborations. My studies have been mostly focused on the mechanisms that lead to the formation of disease tissue-specific pathogenic post-translationally modified proteins and the exploitation of identified pathogenic proteins to develop platform technologies for novel disease - and tissue-specific, diagnosis and targeted treatment.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Dr. Lior Nissim is an Assistant Professor leading the Applicative Synthetic Biology Group at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, School of Medicine. His lab develops synthetic biology platforms that are implemented as effective, practical solutions for therapeutics, biotechnology, and deciphering human biology. Dr. Nissim has multidisciplinary training, including a B.Sc. at Tel Aviv University, an M.Sc. focused on basic cancer research in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, a PhD in a biophysics lab in the Department of Materials and Interfaces at the Weizmann Institute of Science. During his postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Synthetic Biology Center, Dr. Nissim and his colleagues developed several novel synthetic biology platforms including synthetic RNA-based gene circuits for cancer immunotherapy that drive tumor-specific expression of immunostimulatory outputs. He also developed a high-throughput screening approach for identifying Synthetic Promoters with Enhanced Cell-State Specificity (SPECS) that could potentially provide compact synthetic promoters with enhanced specificity to virtually any cell-state, without prior gene regulation or transcriptome knowledge, as long as the screen can be applied to these cells. Finally, Dr. Nissim developed an integrated RNA and CRISPR/Cas gene regulation toolkit that enabled easy, customizable, and scalable manipulation of human cells. The lab of Dr. Nissim has already developed several proprietary technologies that have been licensed to industry partners for further development and commercialization.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Dan Nissley received his PhD in chemistry from Penn State University in 2019 and began working with Charlotte Deane in the Oxford Protein Informatics Group the same year as a postdoctoral fellow. In his current role as a Florence Nightingale Fellow, Dan uses molecular simulation techniques to pursue research questions including how the biophysical characteristics of antibodies and antibody-based therapeutics influence their potency and how protein crystallization can be made an off-the-shelf, easy process.

• Engineering Antibodies

Rajkumar Noubade is Director in Oncology department at Gilead Biosciences in Foster City, CA and has decades of experience in tumor immunology at various levels across industry. His lab focusses on investigating components of tumor microenvironment with the goal of potentiating anti-tumor immunity. He received his PhD from University of Vermont, Burlington VT and completed his postdoctoral training at Genentech, South San Francisco, CA. He has authored and co-authored several manuscripts in high impact journals.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Dr. Shannon Oda received a PhD in Immunology under the mentorship of Dr. Raul Torres at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Philip Greenberg at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She has received several awards, including the Future of Science and the LLS Career Development Program Special Fellow Awards, and has been invited to give talks internationally. Dr. Oda was recruited to the Seattle Children’s Research Institute in 2020, where she is an assistant professor at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research and the University of Washington School of Medicine. Her research focuses on improving T cell immunotherapy, which uses immune cells to target and destroy cancer cells. Dr. Oda and her team have identified several obstacles that inhibit immune cells from effectively eradicating tumors and they are innovating new ways to engineer T cells to overcome these obstacles and improve immunotherapy of hematological and solid tumors.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Pierce Ogden is the Co-Founder and CSO of Manifold Bio and inventor of Manifold’s core technology. Pierce obtained a PhD in George Church’s lab at Harvard, where he developed novel methods of protein library design and assays leveraging multiplex DNA synthesis, sequencing, and machine learning. His work has been published in Science, Nature Biotech, and he is an inventor on several patents related to high-throughput protein engineering.

• Engineering Antibodies

As a physician-scientist, Dr. Olson has over 25 years of experience caring for children with brain tumors and conducts research that focuses on discovering and developing new cancer therapies. He leads the Invent@SC Postdoctoral Scholars program, which will educate 50 scientists from diverse backgrounds to generate novel pediatric therapeutics. His lab’s work has led to more than a dozen national clinical trials. A Phase III trial that he led resulted in a 20% survival improvement for children with Group 3 high-risk medulloblastoma. Dr. Olson is the founder of Presage Biosciences, Blaze Bioscience, and Link Immunotherapeutics. His lab invented the chlorotoxin-based Tumor Paint, which led to the development by Blaze of the clinical candidate Tozuleristide (BLZ-100), now in human trials. He authored “Clinical Pharmacology Made Ridiculously Simple,” which has been the most used pharmacology board review book for more than 25 years. Dr. Olson earned his PhD in Pharmacology in 1989 and his MD in 1991, both from the University of Michigan. He then completed his residency in pediatrics in 1994 and his fellowship in pediatric oncology in 1997, both at the University of Washington. Dr. Olson is currently a Principal Investigator at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute and a Professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the University of Washington.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Dr. Hayat Onyuksel is emerita Professor of Pharmaceutics and Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy. She received her B.S. degree in Pharmacy from Ankara University, Turkey, and Ph.D. degree from London University, England. After a brief post-doctoral experience at the University of Michigan, Dr. Onyuksel joined UIC and worked as faculty from 1987 to 2020. Dr. Onyuksel's research interest is in the area of targeted drug delivery. She uses lipid-based nano carriers to develop nanomedicines with improved drug solubility, stability and safety. Applying her innovative targeted approach she has prepared several anti-cancer, peptide and siRNA nanomedicines and showed on animal models successful treatments of cancer, diabetes, fibrosis, and inflammatory diseases. She has received several prestigious awards including New Investigator Award from American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (1989), the UIC Inventor of the Year 2003 Award, UIC Woman of the Year 2003 Award, American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientist Fellow (2006), UIC Graduate Mentoring Award (2008), UIC University Scholar (2008), AAPS Lipid Based Drug Delivery Outstanding Researcher Award (2008), the most prestigious scientific award of Turkish Republic (TUBITAK) 2014, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow (2019). Her research was extensively supported by federal (NIH, DOD), state (IDPH) and industrial (Novartis, Pfizer) funds. Dr. Onyuksel served on several NIH grant review panels, she was one of the first regular members of then, newly formed NIH Nano study session during 2009-2011. She was an associate editor of the Journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine between 2011-2013.

• mRNA Therapeutics

Dr. Rimas J. Orentas is an investigator at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington School of Medicine. Research in his academic laboratory focuses on CAR T approaches towards treating pediatric solid tumors such as rhabdomyosarcoma, Ewing sarcoma, and osteosarcoma. He continues to develop CAR T approaches to hematologic malignancies and has created 5 first-in-human CAR T products. Dr. Orentas is also a co-founder of the non-profit organization, Caring Cross, Inc., whose goal is to bring cell and gene therapy approaches to sickle cell disease, HIV, and malignancy to low- and middle-income countries.

• SC8: CAR T Cells: Improving Safety While Retaining Therapeutic Activity

An Ouyang is the product manager at ACROBiosystems. Before joining ACRO, he was a postdoc fellow trained at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School with interests in neurophysiology and biomarker discovery. An is mainly focused on the optimization and development of CliniMax ELISA Kit, Transmembrane Proteins, CGT therapy, and other immune products and services. An is actively working with R&D and other ACRO teams to provide excellent products and services to meet our clients’ demands. 

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Professor Pahl has 25 years’ experience in research and teaching and excellent expertise in biochemistry, pharmacology and toxicology. In 2008 he joined industry to pursue drug development for inflammatory and autoimmune diseases at Nycomed and Takeda. In 2012 he joined Heidelberg Pharma as the CSO extending his expertise to the area of oncology and antibody-drug conjugates. Since 2016 he is also CSO of Heidelberg Pharma AG. Professor Pahl continues to be adjunct Professor for pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Peter is the Chief Scientific Officer at Orum Therapeutics based in Cambridge, MA and Daejeon, KR. He has over 20 years of scientific management experience in targeted therapeutics in oncology. At Orum, he is currently overseeing the discovery and development of novel therapeutics based on TPD² - Dual Precision Targeted Protein Degradation platforms. Prior to joining Orum, he served as Vice President of Oncology Research at Bicycle Therapeutics, where he co-invented and developed novel therapeutics using bicyclic peptides to deliver cytotoxic payloads and activate T cell costimulatory pathways. Before that, Peter has also held a variety of roles in oncology drug discovery and development, including Vice President of Biology at Mersana Therapeutics, Senior Director of Discovery Research at ImmunoGen and founder of startup companies. He has co-invented and developed numerous clinical candidates and approved Sarclisa (Isatuximab), a monoclonal antibody designed for the treatment of multiple myeloma. Peter received a B.S. and a Ph.D. in Biology from MIT.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Born and raised in Australia, Michael received his Ph.D. from Sydney University (CSIRO). He moved to the US for a post doc at Columbia University where he investigated integrin-mediated cell signaling, tumorigenesis and biomarkers of radiation exposure. Michael left academia to work at Regeneron where he led a group of scientists developing and validating PK, ADA, NAb and biomarker immunoassays. He has subsequently taken a role interacting with clinical teams as the bioanalytical strategic lead for multiple therapeutic areas.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Agapitos originally trained as a pharmacist, followed by an studies in Immunopharmacology and a  PhD in Immunology/Rheumatology (Uni of Glasgow). He continued his career in academia  specializing in the role of T cells in inflammatory arthritis and published several publications in leading journals. In 2015, he moved to industry focusing on the development of T cell-directed therapies for cancer, employing invariant innate-like T cells. There he led process and product development activities, established CAR-T development programs and had a critical role in securing partnerships and inward investment.

In 2018, Agapitos joined Antibody Analytics where he established translational immunology research services. Agapitos lead the development of several bespoke immunology assays significantly expanding and diversifying  the company’s service portfolio and now strategically leads all R&D and new service development. Agapitos is co-inventor on several patents in the field of T cell therapies and cell line development.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Sofie Pattijn, CTO and founder of ImmunXperts, has over 20 years of experience in the field of immunogenicity assessment (vaccines and biotherapeutics) and in vitro assay development with a focus on functional assays for immunogenicity, immune oncology, and cell and gene therapy products. She has extensive hands-on lab experience and has managed and coached several in vitro teams over the last decade. From 2008 until 2013, she was Head of the in vitro Immunogenicity group at AlgoNomics (Ghent, Belgium) and Lonza Applied Protein Services (Cambridge, UK). Prior to that, she worked at Innogenetics in Belgium for over 15 years.

• TS7A: Introduction to Immunogenicity

Dr. Larry Pease completed Ph.D. training at the University of Michigan and fellowships at the Michigan and Albert Einstein medical schools prior to joining the Department of Immunology at the Mayo Clinic in 1984. Dr. Pease is currently Professor of Immunology and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. He served as Chair of Immunology and Director for the Center of Immunology and Immune Therapies and as a Leader for the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center prior to stepping down from administrative service in 2020. Dr. Pease has expertise in the molecular genetics of antigen presentation and in immunovirology.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Li Peng is the CSO of Palleon Pharmaceuticals, a leading biotechnology company developing drugs that target glycan-mediated immune regulation to treat cancer and inflammatory diseases. Li has led the invention of EAGLE, CONVERGENCE, and HYDRA platform technologies and has overseen Research and Early Development at Palleon. Before joining Palleon, Li had worked at Medimmune/AstraZeneca for ten years in roles of increasing responsibility. She has published +30 scientific papers and is an inventor on +30 patents and patent applications. Li earned a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of California, Davis.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Luke Pennington is the co-founder of Excellergy, a protein therapeutics company developing rapid interventions for allergic diseases. Before founding Excellergy, Luke worked in several research groups studying rheumatological disorders, parasitic infections, and basic T cell biology. He completed his PhD in Immunology at Stanford University in the group of Prof. Theodore Jardetzky, where he investigated the structural biology of IgE, engineered anti-IgE molecules, and created disruptive inhibitors using directed evolution.

• Display of Biologics

Chayne Piscitelli is a Senior Scientist and Group Lead at Zymeworks, Inc., where he works amongst a diverse team of protein engineers in early research and development of multi-specific antibody therapeutics. Prior to Zymeworks, Chayne was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland working on structural studies of GPCR and RTK proteins. He received his PhD at Oregon Health and Science University undertaking structural studies of the membrane transporter protein LeuT, and BSc at Montana State University doing crystallographic and computational studies of antibody Fab proteins. Chayne has been at Zymeworks since 2016, applying his background in structural biology and protein biochemistry to discover and develop next-generation biologics for cancer therapeutics.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Dr. Pavel Pitule joined AbCheck in 2018 and has been an integral part of the team that developed the Company’s functional sorting platform, focusing on the introduction of in-droplet assays and setting up the sorting system for sensitive selection of functional antibodies. Since 2022, he leads AbCheck’s Discovery and coordinates the advanced microfluidics technology development. Pavel holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Charles University in Plzen, Czech Republic. 

• Display of Biologics

Sharon Polleck is a Senior Research Scientist in the Mass Spectrometry and Biophysical Characterization (MSBC) laboratory, a part of the Analytical Research and Development (ARD) group in the BioTherapeutics Pharmaceutical Sciences (BioTx PS) at Pfizer, Inc. In her current role, she applies over 20 years of experience in heightened characterization to develop innovative analytical methods for well-characterized biotherapeutics. She supports many projects within Pfizer's Biotherapeutics portfolio including early- and late-stage molecules ranging from antibodies, recombinant proteins, to mRNA. Sharon has a Master in Biotechnology from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA, and B.S. in Molecular Biology and Organic Chemistry from Merrimack College in N. Andover, MA.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Avery D. Posey, Jr., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, a member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, and a Research Health Scientist at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center. Dr. Posey completed postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Carl June, where he generated glycosylation-specific chimeric antigen receptors to precisely target tumor-glycoforms of MUC1. His laboratory focuses on the generation of novel CAR T-cell therapies targeting tumor-associated glycosylation and developing strategies to enhance CAR T-cell persistence and overcome tumor-induced immunosuppression.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Dr. Prod’homme is the Vice President of Translational Research at Myeloid Therapeutics. He brings over 15 years of experience in pharmacology, IND preparation, and early clinical development. Prior to joining Myeloid Therapeutics, Dr. Prod’homme served as Senior Director in Translational Medicine at Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and held several positions of increasing responsibility at Momenta Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer. Dr. Prod’homme holds a PhD in Immunology from Universite Rene Descartes in Paris, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Scott Zamvil’s laboratory at University of California, San Francisco. He has authored several patents and published in top-tier scientific journals.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Yu Qiu is currently Digital Biologics Advance Application Lead (Senior Principal Scientist) at Sanofi. He earned his PhD in Biochemistry in 2012, where he mainly used NMR to study protein structures and dynamics.Then he moved to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a postdoc where he studied a Ubiquitin-like protein conjugation cascade in autophagy by biochemistry, enzymology, crystallography and EM. In 2017, Yu became a Senior Scientist in the Biologics Research department of Sanofi. At Sanofi, he solves structures of antibody-antigen complexes by crystallography and cryoEM and provides structure-based antibody engineering support to projects in multiple therapeutic areas. Since early last year, he has led a small group focusing on in silico antibody engineering and de novo design mainly by physics-based and ML-based methods.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Dr. Laszlo Radvanyi is the President & Scientific Director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR; https://oicr.on.ca/), bringing over 30 years of oncology research background in academia and leadership experience in international pharma and biotech. He is also a Professor in the Immunology Department at the University of Toronto where he performs research on the role of genomic non-coding regions, including transposable retroelements and human endogenous retroviruses, on cancer immunoregulation as well as the early interaction of the immune system with tumor cells during the initial stages of cancer development to find targets for early intervention. Laszlo joined OICR from EMD Serono (Merck KGaA), where he was Senior Vice President Global Head of the Immuno-Oncology Translational Innovation Platform and Senior Scientific Advisor for Immunology and Immunotherapy. Prior to this, Laszlo was a Professor in the Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for 10 years where he ran an integrated clinical and basic cancer immunotherapy research program focusing on adoptive cell therapy. He was founding CSO of Iovance Biotherapeutics, a pioneering company commercializing tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) adoptive cell therapies for melanoma and other cancers. Laszlo sits on numerous grant review boards and biotech advisory boards and is a sought-after expert in cancer biology and immunotherapy and a thought leader in the field of oncology research strategy.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Dr. Maryam Sarmazdeh is an assistant professor of Chemical Engineering. Her research is focused on biomolecular engineering and synthetic biology to develop novel biotechnology tools and products to solve major issues in human health, sustainability, and environment. Her research group is interested in targeting metalloproteinases by engineering protein scaffolds such as antibody and tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) using directed evolution and rational design.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Jonah Rainey holds a PhD in Biochemistry from Tufts University and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin and the Salk Institute. He has engaged in discovery, research, and development of bispecific antibodies for more than 15 years. He is an inventor on several patents describing novel bispecific platforms and current clinical candidates that exploit these platforms as well as an author on almost 30 publications. Jonah contributed to research and early development leading to multiple clinical candidates from Phase I and through approved products and led many advanced preclinical programs in oncology, infectious disease, autoimmunity, and other therapeutic areas. Previous industry experience includes MacroGenics, MedImmune/AZ, Oriole Biotech, Gritstone Oncology, and Alivamab Discovery Services. Currently, Jonah is a Senior Director in Protein Science at Eli Lilly & Co.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies
• TS3A: Introduction to Bispecific Antibodies: History, Engineering, and Application

Alexey Rak got his MSc in biology and genetics, and in biochemistry. He then completed PhDs in biochemistry and biophysics working on protein biosynthesis machinery characterization. He did his PostDoc and then held a group leader position at Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Germany, working in the field of vesicular membrane trafficking. For this work he was awarded several honors including European Young Investigator Award in 2004. Since 2007, Alexey joined Sanofi in Paris where he has developed new methods to characterize biomolecular interactions as well as new approaches in protein structure determination including cryo-EM and enabling the lead discovery of challenging protein targets. Alexey is heading Bio Structure and Biophysics at Integrated Drug Discovery in Sanofi.

• Biophysical Methods

Bala Rao is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State University, and the Director of Academic Programs at Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center (BTEC) at NC State University. His laboratory at NCSU is engaged in research in two areas: study of early human placental development using in vitro models, and development of high throughput platforms for design and characterization of biomolecular interactions.

• Display of Biologics

Dr. Reda Rawi is currently a Staff Scientist and the Co-Head of the Structural Bioinformatics Core at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center (VRC). He earned his Diploma in Mathematics from the Applied University of Koblenz, Germany in 2007, his MSc in Bioinformatics from the Birkbeck college at the University of London, UK in 2008, and his PhD in Computational Biology from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, in 2013, working with Prof. Dr. Daniel Hoffmann. After completing his PhD, Reda accepted a position as a postdoctoral scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute in Doha, Qatar, where he worked for 2.5 years. During that time, he developed and applied novel machine learning tools for structural biology related projects. In 2016, Reda was awarded a NIH postdoctoral fellowship and joined the Structural Bioinformatics Core of the VRC, the world's leading research facility for vaccine design. Within just 3 years he was promoted to a Staff Scientist and co-head of the core. While at the VRC Reda was leading multiple vaccine design and antibody improvement efforts targeting a diverse set of pathogens, such as HIV-1, Influenza, or Malaria. Reda introduced the computer science field of advanced machine learning to the VRC and successfully applied his expertise to solve scientific tasks of critical importance. Dr. Rawi has over 50 peer-reviewed publications and was invited to multiple conferences to update on his work.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Christian Reichen, Associate Director Oncology Research at Molecular Partners, is co-project leader for the DARPin molecule-based T cell engagers platform and the MP0533 pre-clinical AML therapeutic program. In previous roles within Molecular Partners, he supported and lead several pipeline projects and was responsible for sequence optimization in the protein engineering subgroup. Christian completed his undergraduate studies at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland, then earned his Ph.D. at the University of Zurich in the group of Prof. Andreas Pluckthun, where he established a novel binding scaffold based on armadillo repeat proteins using a computationally based design approach.

• Display of Biologics

Dr. Janice Reichert is an internationally recognized expert in the development of antibody therapeutics. She is Executive Director of The Antibody Society, a non-profit association representing individuals and organizations that engage in antibody-related research or development. Dr. Reichert is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of mAbs, a peer-reviewed, PubMed-indexed biomedical journal that focuses on topics relevant to antibody research and development. Dr. Reichert writes frequently on development trends for antibody therapeutics, including the annual ‘Antibodies to Watch’ articles published in mAbs, and she has presented her research results as an invited speaker at conferences held worldwide.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy
• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic
• Cell-Based Immunotherapies
• Optimizing Protein Expression
• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond
• mRNA Therapeutics
• Biophysical Methods
• Engineering Antibodies
• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Dr. Susan Richards is a member of Translational Medicine and Early Development in Sanofi R&D where she contributes as global scientific expert in immunogenicity. Previously, she was the Head of the Clinical Laboratory Sciences Department in Sanofi/Genzyme Biologics R&D, responsible for Clinical Assay Development, Clinical Specialty Lab and Investigative Clinical Immunology. The department supported assay development and bioanalysis of PK, biomarkers and immunogenicity of biologics in clinical development and post approval for replacement enzymes, monoclonal antibodies and gene therapy programs. Dr. Richards’ research interests include immune tolerance induction (ITI) for replacement enzymes and her lab pioneered nonclinical studies for prophylactic use of short-term methotrexate for ITI. She is an active member and Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

No bio available.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Tim Riley leads the protein engineering group at A2 Biotherapeutics, using structural and computational biology to design novel protein receptors for logic-gated CAR systems. Previously, he led the protein engineering teams at Amgen and Structured Immunity, with applications to multi-specifics, T cell engagers, and T cell Receptors. He holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame, having studied the structural underpinnings of T cell Receptor recognition under Dr. Brian Baker.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Anne Rios obtained her PhD in 2011. Her work represented a novel cell signaling mechanism that triggers the differentiation of a defined subset of cells within a stem pool (Nature, 2011). She then joined the laboratory of Professor Visvader focusing on Breast Cancer. A researcher at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, she was awarded the Neil Lawrence prize at the 2016 Centenary Institute Medical Innovation Awards for her project entitled ‘A journey into the unexpected: A 3D view of breast cancer’ which represented her post-doctoral work (Nature, 2014). She has developed a new 3D imaging technique that allows scientists to visualize entire breast tissues down to a single-cell level. She is the only researcher in Australia - and one of the few in the world - to do this. In 2017, she was appointed group leader at the Princess Maxima Center and Head the Princess Maxima Imaging Centre. She is currently investigating the cellular mechanisms underlying pediatric solid tumor progression using State-of-the-art imaging technologies.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Theo Rispens studied chemistry in Groningen, The Netherlands. He received his PhD in 2004 following research of chemical reactivity in biological models systems. Since 2006 he has worked at Sanquin, where is staff member at the department of Immunopathology of Sanquin Research. Current research activities focus on the structure and function of immunoglobulins and the mutual interactions between the immune system and therapeutic antibodies. One research line involves mechanisms of humoral tolerance, in particular the biology of IgG4 antibody responses in health and disease. Furthermore, he studies the immune response to biologicals in autoimmune patients, particularly in rheumatology, and is responsible for the development of novel immunoassays to support this research line, and to implement for world-wide service testing at Sanquin Diagnostic Services, to support the optimization of treatment strategies with biologicals.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

J. Rodo earned a PhD in biochemistry under Prof. Fatima Bosch at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, developing AAV-mediated gene therapy approaches for metabolic and rare disorders. At Svar Life Science, he worked developing and validating bioassays to overcome gene therapy hurdles. Currently, he serves as global innovation & scientific lead, collaborating with cross-functional teams to evaluate new technologies and develop growth strategies.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Dr. Rizwan Romee is an associate professor at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on gene editing of NK cells to enhance their tumor targeting and also to overcome their inhibition in the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. He also leads DFCI's NK cell therapeutics initiative encompassing evaluating engineered NK cells in the clinic in combination with novel immunomodulatory agents.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Chris Roth joined Abilita Bio as the Vice President of Innovation in 2016, capping more than two decades of expertise in membrane protein engineering, structural biology and drug discovery. Prior to joining Abilita Bio, Dr. Roth was an early member of the scientific team at Receptos, where he led GPCR protein engineering and technology development efforts from 2009 to 2015. Dr. Roth conducted postdoctoral research in GPCR structural biology in the laboratory of Dr. Raymond Stevens at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), where he also earned his PhD.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Dr. Theo Roth, MD, PhD was the founding CSO and is a scientific co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences. He completed his undergraduate and masters work at Stanford University and the NIH in biomedical informatics and systems biology. During his MD-PhD at UCSF, he developed non-viral genome targeting, a new efficient method for large scale genetic engineering of primary human immune cells without the need for complex viral vectors. He further developed robust methods of pooled knock-in screening, enabling rapid discovery of synthetic sequences to re-wire T cell genomes. This work has led to pre-clinical development of novel cell therapies for both autoimmune disease and solid tumors. He is currently his residency in clinical pathology at Stanford University.

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Dr. Roybal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is currently a member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and an inaugural Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. He is also the Deputy Director of the UCSF Center for Synthetic Immunology recently funded by the Cancer Moonshot Initiative. He was awarded the Sartorius and Science Magazine Prize for Regenerative Medicine and Cell Therapy, the NIH New Innovator Award in 2018, and a CRI STAR award in 2022. The Roybal lab harnesses the tools of Synthetic Biology and Immunology to control and customize immune cell therapeutics for cancer and autoimmunity. His body of work was foundational to the next-generation immune cell therapy company, Cell Design Labs, where he was a founding scientist. Cell Design Labs was acquired by Gilead at the end of 2017. He was also instrumental in developing universal CAR T cell technology in collaboration with Xyphos Biosciences, which was acquired by Astellas at the end of 2019. He has now co-founded Arsenal Biosciences, which focuses on building cellular therapies for solid tumors with a combination of cutting-edge synthetic biology and gene editing technologies.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Dr. Marco Ruella obtained his medical degree with high honors and completed his specialization in clinical hematology at the University of Torino, Italy. He was attending physician at the Hematology and Cell Therapy Division of the Mauriziano Hospital and was an Instructor at the Biotechnology School at the University of Torino. From late 2012, he was a Post-doctoral Fellow, and then an Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Center for Cellular immunotherapies (Drs. June and Gill). From 2017 to 2018 he served as Associate Director of Dr. June’s laboratory. In 2018, Dr. Ruella was appointed Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology and the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies and Scientific Director of the Lymphoma Program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ruella was awarded many awards and honors, including the inaugural SITC EMD-Serono Cancer Immunotherapy Clinical Fellowship (2014), the AACR-BMS Oncology Fellowship in Clinical Cancer Research (2015), the ASH Scholar Award (2016), a NIH K99-R00 award (2017), the “Paola Campese” Award Leukemia Research (2017), the Cancer Support Community Award (2018), the 2018 ASH Joanne Levy, MD, Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement, the Gilead Sciences Research Scholar in Hematology/Oncology and the Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation Award (2020), and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Translational Research Program (2021). Dr. Ruella is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications on targeted immunotherapies for hematological cancers and is an inventor in several patents on CART therapy and the Scientific Founder of viTToria biotherapeutics.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Bonita Rup is a biopharmaceutical development consultant, providing expert advice on bioanalysis, immunogenicity risk assessment, and related regulatory strategy aspects of biopharmaceutical development. Previously she was Research Fellow and lead for the Immunogenicity Discipline at Pfizer, Assistant Vice President of Protein Bioanalytics in Wyeth, and held various positions directing development and application of immuno-ligand binding assay technologies for PK, immunogenicity and protein impurity analysis, and other aspects of biopharmaceutical development. During her career, she has been involved in multiple regulatory filings during preclinical, clinical development and marketing approval of biopharmaceutical products. She has been a member of AAPS, EIP, European IMI ABIRISK consortium, and Biosafe; with these organizations, she has been a co-author for multiple publications related to monitoring immunogenicity and bioanalysis of therapeutic proteins. Bonnie received her B.S. from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Ph.D. from University of Texas, Austin, and conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University and University of Rochester, NY.

• TS7A: Introduction to Immunogenicity

Laila is a Senior Research Scientist in large-molecule biophysics within early-stage research at Novo Nordisk, Denmark. She obtained a PhD in Biochemistry in 2019 from Lund University, Sweden, and moved to Austria to join Novartis as a Senior Scientist in Global Drug Development. In 2020, she returned to academia as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests include experimental and computational work within antibody developability, and study of protein-protein/molecular interactions.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Stefano Sammicheli obtained a PhD in Immunology from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and trained as postdoctoral fellow at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute and the Francis Crick Institute where he joined the Group of Prof. Caetano Reis e Sousa to work on cancer immunity. In 2018 he joined Roche Innovation Center Zurich as a Senior Scientist developing antibody-based programs for cancer immune therapies. Currently he is the Director of Innate Cell Engagers at Ichnos Sciences, and he is leading several therapeutic antibody discovery programs, one of which has reached FDA approval and Phase I trial.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Dr. Dharmaraj Samuel is currently leading the protein science team at Catalent’s Emeryville site. His team develops SMARTag® monoclonal antibodies that form part of the best-in-class SMARTag ADC platform technology from Catalent Biologics. Prior to this role he worked at Gilead Sciences, Pfizer, CytomX and Gritstone Bio in the fields of blood coagulation, antivirals, kinase inhibitors and immune oncology, advancing several molecules into clinical trials. He is an expert in developability assessment, purifying highly challenging bi- and tri-specific biologics, and automating upstream and downstream bioprocessing protocols compatible for manufacturing. He received his Ph.D. from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Dr. Volker Sandig initiated ProBioGen’s cell line development program in 2000 resulting in the unique CHO.RiGHT® platform for protein production. He is co-inventor of key ProBioGen technologies including AGE1 designer cell lines, GlymaxX® and DirectedLuck®. His current work aims at modernizing manufacture of viral vectors and establishing new platforms for RNA delivery. This includes customized design of suspension cell lines for viral vaccines as well as packaging and producer cell lines for gene therapy vectors. For his innovation and contribution to the field of Animal Cell Culture Technology he received the Inaugural 2019 ESACT Innovation Award. Prior to joining ProBioGen, he led a research group at Merck Research Laboratories, USA, focusing on the development of manufacturing systems for gutless adenoviruses and vectored vaccines. Volker Sandig holds a medical degree and received his doctorate in Molecular Biology from the Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Dr. Laura Santambrogio received her PhD from Padua University and trained as a post-doctoral fellow at NYU and Harvard Medical School with Jack Strominger. She was recruited at Albert Einstein College of Medicine with an Irene Diamond Professorship in Immunology and recently moved to Weill Cornell where she held the position of Associate Director of Precision Immunology in the Englander Institute of Precision Medicine, Professor of Radiation Oncology, Physiology and Biophysics. Current efforts in her laboratory are focused on the mechanisms of antigen processing and presentation, peptide binding to MHC class II molecules and the overall role of dendritic cells in innate and adaptive immune responses. She is tackling these questions using an integrated approach that combines cell biology, biochemistry and biophysics. Important questions addressed by her laboratory relate to the different cellular pathways utilized for antigen processing and presentation which include autophagy, endosomal processing and surface MHC II loading. Additionally, she is interested in understanding how changes in the cellular transcriptome and metabolome translate in the plasticity of the MHC II immunopeptidome.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Aaron is CSO of Twist Bioscience and leads the Twist Biopharma business unit.  Prior to Twist, he served as Chief Scientific Officer of LakePharma, leading the California Antibody Center, which discovers novel antibody therapeutics for its clients. He also oversaw all discovery research functions both as Vice President of Protein Sciences at Surrozen, and previously, as Vice President of Research at Sutro Biopharma, Inc. He also held director level positions at both Oncomed and Dyax Corp.

• Display of Biologics

Shuji Sato holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Brandeis University and a PhD in Molecular and Microbiology from Tufts University in Massachusetts. He completed his Postdoctoral Fellow at the New England Primate Research Center, Harvard Medical School. Prior to joining IPA, Dr. Sato worked for a variety of organizations, including Cell Signaling Technology and Pfizer. Most recently, he held the position of Associate Director, Antibody Discovery with Dragonfly Therapeutics in the Biologics Generation Group.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Volker Schellenberger is President and CTO of Amunix Pharmaceuticals, which he co-founded in 2006. He initially served as Amunix’ Chief Scientific Officer and is the lead inventor of the company’s XTEN as well as XPAT platforms of protease-activated T cell engagers. Volker has over 25 years of industry experience in protein engineering and drug discovery. Prior to co-founding Amunix he served as head of Genencor’s protein engineering department. Volker received his Ph.D. from Leipzig University (Germany) in 1986. He is author of over 40 scientific papers and inventor of more than 70 issued or pending patent applications. He is a recipient of the Karl Lohmann prize of the German Society of Biochemists.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

Alexander Schinagl is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at OncoOne, a biotech company focusing on the development of innovative therapeutics for treatment of patients with solid tumors and inflammatory diseases. He received a PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna and is an expert in antibody engineering. Previously, Alexander worked at Baxter, Baxalta and Shire, where he led several discovery projects on antibody-drug conjugates for the treatment of cancers. At OncoOne Alexander leads the design and development of antibodies aimed at the treatment of solid tumors and inflammatory diseases.

• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond

Dr. Schnitzer, MD, has devoted more than 30 years to understanding vascular endothelial cell barrier function and drug delivery in medicine, specifically how best to overcome this barrier to improve therapeutic impact of drugs in cancer, lung, and other diseases. His lab currently focuses on drug delivery systems, small animal intravital and whole body imaging, how caveolae function in transport, proteomic mapping of endothelial cell surface and its caveolae in normal and diseased tissues, antibody engineering, nanocarriers, ADCs, and new therapeutics in cancer and lung disease. Dr. Schnitzer is the CEO and founder of Proteogenomics Institute for Systems Medicine. Dr. Schnitzer has a BSE degree in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University and MD from University of Pittsburgh. He also trained as a postdoctoral fellow in cell biology at Yale University School of Medicine. He is also a Faculty Member at the Institute of Engineering for Medicine at UCSD.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Oliver Schon, PhD, is the Vice President of R&D at BiVictriX Therapeutics, a UK-based SME focused on developing differentiated bispecific ADC medicines. Dr. Schon obtained his PhD in Cancer Research from The University of Cambridge, before joining Sir Greg Winter’s biotech venture, Domantis Ltd. in 2003, which was acquired by GSK three years later. Dr. Schon continued to work at GSK for over ten years, dedicated to developing biologics and cell therapy platforms for use in the clinic until he joined IO-focused American biotech, Agenus, Inc. in 2017. It was here that he amassed considerable CMC and biologics-based therapeutics manufacturing experience, developing numerous bispecific antibodies from discovery up until Investigational New Drug (IND), and beyond. At BiVictriX, Dr. Schon is applying his broad expertise from lead discovery to manufacture, in order to progress differentiated and developable therapeutic ADC candidates to clinical development.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Allison Schulkins is Chief Operating Officer at Single Cell Technology. She received her MS degree in Chemical Engineering from San Jose State University and her BS degree from UC Santa Barbara. Allison's educational and professional background has been focused on molecular biology, design of experiments, bioprocess engineering, project management, and polymer chemistry. 

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

As Global Head of the Large Molecules Research Platform at Sanofi, Rebecca is responsible for the progression of the Large Molecules portfolio, which includes discovery, design, and generation of novel biologics from target validation to IND-filing. Sanofi’s innovative biologics portfolio includes antibodies, NANOBODY proteins, SYNTHORIN proteins, fusion proteins, multi-specific antibodies, and antibody-drug conjugates. Previously, Rebecca spent 20 years working in the area of Biologics Development, starting with Genzyme in 2000, and as part of Sanofi starting in 2011. During this time, she contributed to the successful development, commercialization, or post-marketing commitments for several biologics. From 2015 to 2018, she was responsible for the end-to-end Sanofi US CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls) organization spanning cell line development through GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) manufacture of Drug Product for clinical studies, including gene therapy applications. Rebecca holds a PhD in Biophysical Chemistry from Cornell University and earned her undergraduate degree in Biology and Chemistry from the University of Vermont.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic
• Cell-Based Immunotherapies
• Optimizing Protein Expression
• Emerging Targets for Oncology and Beyond
• mRNA Therapeutics
• Biophysical Methods
• Engineering Antibodies
• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

A driven multidisciplinary biochemical scientist with 6+ years of experience building novel automation solutions for high-throughput biologics production and characterization. Specific experience with developing fully integrated, automated protein production and purification workflows. Expertise in transient transfection, protein production, protein purification, HTS, HT automation, antibody engineering, antibody validation, yeast library sorting, protein biochemistry, disease modeling, and mammalian cell culture. Proficient in 4 automation platforms: Biomek, LYNX, TECAN and Hamilton.

• Maximizing Protein Production Workflows
• Optimizing Protein Expression

Andrew Sewell initially trained in Chemistry and undertook a PhD in Genetics at the University of Liverpool (1991) before embarking on postdoctoral training at the University of Utah. He returned to the UK in 1995 to research how the HIV virus evades the human immune system at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford where he became a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow. He relocated to Cardiff University in 2006 and became a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator and has been continuously Wellcome-funded for over 25 years. His research group focuses on T-cell ligands and the receptors that recognise them (αβTCR, γδTCR, CD4 and CD8). Most of the Sewell laboratory’s recent work is based around understanding the basic biology of antigen recognition by human T-cells using novel pipelines for the discovery of new T-cell targets. Collaborations with various partners have been established to develop cancer immunotherapies and have resulted in recent co-authored papers in Nature Medicine with Immunocore, Adaptimmune and Autolus and newer collaborations with Enara Bio and Continuum Life Sciences. Current research projects include: Dissection of successful immune responses after successful cancer immunotherapy or spontaneous remission; TCR gene transfer therapy (TCR-T); Novel CAR-T technologies; T-cell receptor-optimised peptide skewing or the repertoire of T-cells (TOPSORT); Artificial (non-biologic) T-cell antigens as vaccines; T-cell/TCR-based diagnostics in autoimmune disease; and unconventional (non-HLA-restricted) T-cell responses to infection and tumours. Sewell has amassed over 200 scientific publications that have been cited over 14,000 times in total. His work has been featured on 28 journal covers and his H-index, and i10 index since 2016, are 67 and 119 respectively (March 2021; Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=9xVur0cAAAAJ).

• Improving Immunotherapy Efficacy and Safety

Pragya Shah is a Senior Scientist in the Cell and Protein Sciences group within the Biologics department at AbbVie. In this role, she supports development of cell lines needed for antibody drug discovery across all therapeutic areas as well as drug discovery stages from early exploratory to Lead Optimization and Candidate Nomination. Her group develops cell lines for target identification and validation; binding and functional screening assays, cell-based assays, and species cross-reactivity, as well as MOA studies. Dr. Shah received her PhD in the field of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, focusing on Cancer Cell Biology, from Cornell University.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

No bio available.

• Characterization for Novel Biotherapeutics

Dr. Weiping Shao is currently Sr. Group Director and Head of US GxP Testing Lab at AstraZeneca (AZ), where he leads regulated bioanalysis and scientific innovation to support the development of biologics modalities across all therapeutic areas. Weiping brings more than 20 years of experience and leadership in pharmaceutical / biotech industry, including his previous role as Vice President of Biologics Services at a global contract research organization and Director of Bioanalytical Operations at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He has built and led cross-functional organization that supported biologics development, bioanalytical services and biomarker discovery. Weiping has published over 40 peer reviewed manuscripts/commentaries, filed US patents and co-authored industry Best Practices. He holds leadership roles at ISBER organization, chairs conferences and has given numerous presentations. He earned his Ph.D. from Nanjing University and completed his post-doctoral Fellowship in Biochemistry at University of California, San Diego.

• Immunogenicity Assessment and Management

Susan Sharfstein is a Professor of Nanobioscience at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany, New York. Professor Sharfstein received her B.S. in chemical engineering with honors from Caltech in 1987 and her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley in 1993. Her interests include mammalian and microbial cell bioprocessing, control of protein glycosylation, metabolic engineering, biosensing, and development of systems for high-throughput screening of nucleic acids and small molecules. She is the author of over 65 papers and book chapters in the fields of biotechnology and bioprocessing.

• Optimizing Protein Expression

Dr. Michal Sheffer is an Instructor of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Michal’s work is focused on ways to overcome the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment using engineered natural killer cells (NKs) for cellular therapies. Michal was a postdoc fellow at the Mitsiades lab, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, where she studied the molecular mechanisms that allow tumor cells to escape killing by NKs. Michal completed her PhD in computational biology at the Domany lab, Weizmann Institute, Israel.

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Alex Shephard is the Product Manager for Leprechaun at Unchained Labs. She has many years of experience at the bench and as a field application scientist characterizing exosomes and viruses, using techniques including NTA, DLS, nanoflow cytometry, fluorescence and interferometry. Shephard completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at Bristol University, UK, and held a postdoc position in the Tumour Microenvironment Group at Cardiff University, UK.

• Next-Generation Immunotherapies

Dr. Rachel Shi is currently a Principal Scientist in the Department of Biochemical and Cellular Pharmacology at Genentech Research & Early Development in South San Francisco, California. Rachel received her undergraduate degree from Tianjin University in China with a major in Pharmaceutical Science in 2011. Rachel then obtained her PhD in Analytical Chemistry with Prof. David Clemmer at Indiana University Bloomington and performed her postdoctoral research with Prof. Michael Gross at Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining Genentech in the summer of 2021, Rachel worked at Amgen and AbbVie where she provided analytical support for CQA assessment, extensive characterization, and comparability studies of therapeutic proteins. Rachel’s studies at Genentech focus on developing and applying mass spectrometry-based assays for bioanalytical and biotransformation studies in the large molecule drug portfolio.

• Biophysical Methods

Dr Sidhu is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and the Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto. Dr Sidhu is also the founder of the Toronto Recombinant Antibody Centre (TRAC) and the Centre for Commercialization of Antibodies and Biologics (CCAB). Dr. Sidhu joined the Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research in 2008 after ten years as a Principal Investigator in the Department of Protein Engineering at Genentech. He returned to academia after a distinguished career at Genentech where he led the development of its phage display technology. Dr. Sidhu's research is primarily focused in the field of protein engineering and technologies that explore and shape protein and antibody structure and function, with the aim of crafting better therapies for cancer and other diseases. He has a wealth of experience in commercial antibody discovery. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and is a co-inventor on more than 50 patents granted or filed with the US patent office. Dr. Sidhu was the recipient of the 2015 Christian B. Anfinsen Award of the Protein Society for significant technological achievements in protein research.

• Display of Biologics

Karen Silence brings more than 25 years of experience in antibody development, from pre-clinical research through to early clinical studies. She was actively involved in the start-up of two successful biotech companies, Ablynx and arGEN-X. At both companies, she was the project manager responsible for advancing the discovery and pre-clinical/clinical development of their products, which eventually led to Sanofi’s acquisition of Ablynx and arGEN-X’s exclusive global collaboration and license agreement with Cilag GmbH International, an affiliate of Janssen in 2018. She also worked for Staten Biotechnology, supporting their product discovery and pre-clinical development.

• Emerging Indications for Therapeutic Antibodies

Will Singleterry, PhD leads commercial operations for the Immuno-Oncology unit at Lumicks, a life sciences company dedicated to understanding how avidity and applied forces between cells can create more effective and safe immunotherapies. His expertise in functional biomarkers of immune response has allowed contributions to the field of Immuno-Oncology by bringing novel tools to researchers to discover and define the mechanisms that drive improved patient outcomes. 

• Cell-Based Immunotherapies

Dr. Eric Smith received his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from Duke University in 1997. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU he joined Regeneron in 2002 as a member of the Antibody and Trap Technologies group, where he worked on cytokine traps and related molecules. In 2008 he was a founding member of the Bispecific Antibodies team and is currently the Executive Director of Bispecifics at Regeneron.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Josh Smith is a Principal Scientist at Just - Evotec Biologics, where he leads the Just Data Science team. His team develops machine learning models and software products to support more efficient biologics discovery, design, and process development. As an individual contributor, he has conceived of, created, and productionized multiple ML-based tools for antibody assessment and design. Before joining Just, he earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering with an Advanced Data Science option at the University of Washington, Seattle.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Ernest S. Smith, Ph.D. has served as Senior Vice President, Research and Chief Scientific Officer at Vaccinex since 2003.  Ernest previously served as Research Director at Vaccinex and was a research scientist at the University of Rochester. Dr. Smith received a B.A. in Biology from St. John Fisher College, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Rochester.

• Antibodies for Cancer Therapy

No bio available.

• Engineering Bispecific Antibodies

Vanita Sood is currently Senior Vice President, Head of Drug Discovery Research at stealth Versant NewCo. With over 14 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, she has worked at the intersection of computational and experimental drug discovery. She has focused on many aspects of drug design such as using computational chemistry and computational protein engineering to optimize potency and drug-like properties of small molecule and biotherapeutic drug candidates, respectively; using biophysical methods and cryo-EM to better understand the mechanisms of multi-specific biologics; using modeling and simulation in conjunction with innovative cell culture to better predict and optimize PK; and using generative modeling and machine learning to design and optimize therapeutics.

• Machine Learning Approaches for Protein Engineering

Dr. Jamie Spangler earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and went on to complete a PhD in Biological Engineering at MIT under the supervision of Professor K. Dane Wittrup. She conducted postdoctoral training in Professor K. Christopher Garcia’s lab at Stanford University School of Medicine, and then launched her independent research group at Johns Hopkins University in July 2017, jointly between the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. Dr. Spangler’s lab, located in the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at the School of Medicine, applies structural and mechanistic insights to re-engineer existing proteins and design new proteins that therapeutically modulate the immune response. In particular, her group is interested in engineering immune molecules such as antibodies, cytokines, and growth factors for targeted treatment of diseases such as cancer, infectious diseases, and autoimmune disorders. Dr. Spangler’s work has been recognized with honors including a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Career Development Fellowship, a V Foundation Scholar award, and a Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund Discovery award.

• Optimizing Protein Expression
• Display of Biologics

Philipp Spycher obtained his Master’s Degree and Ph.D. from ETH Zurich (Switzerland) at the interface of Material Science and Protein Engineering. During his post-doctoral work at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI, Switzerland), he introduced the novel approach using transglutaminases for antibody conjugation that led to the discovery of the Araris Linker Technology. Philipp won the PSI Founder Fellowship as well as several other prices and grants to commercialize the technology. He is now leading Araris as CEO and managed to assemble a world-class team of co-founders and co-workers.

• Driving Clinical Success in Antibody-Drug Conjugates

Dr. Jessica Stark is currently an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University. Her postdoctoral work focuses on identifying and targeting glycans that act as immune checkpoints for next-generation cancer immunotherapy. As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow with Prof. Michael Jewett at Northwestern University, Jessica developed cell-free technologies for protein therapeutic and vaccine production that promise to enable portable and personalized medicine. Previously, she received her B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University, supported by an Irwin and Joan Jacobs Engineering Scholarship. Jessica’s work has been recognized with multiple awards and honors, including an NIH/NCI Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Hanna H. Gray Fellow Finalist Award, a Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellowship, an NIH Biotechnology Training Program Fellowship, induction to the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society, and the Northwestern Chemical Engineering Department’s Distinguished Graduate Researcher Award. Jessica is committed to enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM through mentoring, outreach, and service activities, most recently as a selected member of the Stanford Chemistry Department’s Equity and Inclusion committee. To support this work, she co-developed and commercialized BioBits educational kits that promise to increase access to high-quality biology education by facilitating hands-on learning.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Eric Sterner, PhD, is an Associate Principal Scientist within Discovery Biologics at Merck Research Labs in Boston, Massachusetts. His research interests include glycobiology/glycoengineering, therapeutic protein discovery and engineering, and high-throughput expression and purification technologies which enable rapid hit-to-lead characterization and development. Dr. Sterner received his PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and was a Cancer Research Training Award (CTRA) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chemical Biology Laboratory of the National Cancer Institute.

• Difficult-to-Express Proteins

JoAnn Suzich is the Head of Research at Immunocore where she leads the design and discovery of bispecific soluble T cell engagers for the treatment of oncology, autoimmune disease, and chronic infections. Prior to joining Immunocore, Dr. Suzich was Vice President of Infectious Disease and Vaccines Research at MedImmune and then was the Microbial Sciences Therapeutic Area Head at AstraZeneca where she was responsible for the development of monoclonal antibody-based drugs including bispecifics to prevent and/or treat RSV, influenza, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Early in her career, Dr. Suzich led the R&D team developing virus-like particle technology for HPV vaccines used to prevent cervical cancer. Dr. Suzich received her PhD in biochemistry from Purdue University and did post-doctoral work at the University of Minnesota.

• Advancing Bispecific Antibodies and Combination Therapy to the Clinic

Siret Tahk graduated with her PhD at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the research group of Prof Karl-Peter Hopfner. During her PhD project she developed novel immunotherapies that combine immune checkpoint inhibition with antibody-based tumor targeting. Currently she is a senior scientist managing the development of therapeutic antibodies for oncology targets in Icosagen.  

• Engineering Antibodies

Mikko Taipale is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto. After receiving his MSc in genetics at the University of Oulu, he joined the international PhD programme in EMBL in Heidelberg, where he completed his PhD in Asifa Akhtar’s lab working on chromatin regulation by histone acetylation. He then went to Sue Lindquist’s lab at the Whitehead Institute for postdoctoral training. There, he focused on the client recognition mechanisms of Hsp90 chaperone and co-chaperones and on developing high-throughput protein/protein and drug/target interactions. Mikko started his lab at the Donnelly Centre and the University of Toronto in 2014. Now, the Taipale lab is focused on diverse aspects of functional proteomics and genomics, including protein homeostasis, transcriptional regulation, disease variant phenotyping, and host/pathogen interactions.

• Display of Biologics

Susana Teixeira is a staff scientist at the Center for Neutron Science of the University of Delaware, and a guest researcher at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) where she works as an instrument scientist. Susana previously worked for 12 years at the European Photon and Neutron campus in France, where she held a joint position as a Biophysics Lecturer (Keele University, UK) and neutron crystallography instrument scientist. Susana has a long-standing interest in developing sample-environment techniques applied to structure and stability studies of proteins with biopharma or food-related applications. She currently leads the development of high-pressure studies for small angle neutron scattering studies of biomolecules at the NIST Center for Neutron Research.

• Biophysical Methods

Peter Tessier is the Albert M. Mattocks (Endowed) Professor in the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, and a member of the Biointerfaces Institute at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware (2003, NASA Graduate Fellow) and performed his postdoctoral studies at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT (2003-2007, American Cancer Society Fellow). Tessier started his independent career as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2007, and he was an endowed full professor at Rensselaer prior to moving to the University of Michigan in 2017. Tessier’s research focuses on designing, optimizing, characterizing and formulating a class of large therapeutic proteins (antibodies) that hold great potential for detecting and treating human disorders ranging from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. He has received a number of awards and fellowships in recognition of his pioneering work: Pew Scholar Award in Biomedical Sciences (2010-2014), Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (2014-2015), Young Scientist Award from the World Economic Forum (2014), Young Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society (2015) and NSF CAREER Award (2010-2015).

• Biophysical Methods