Dr Fahima Kausar is Team Lead at Leucid Bio. She received her PhD in respiratory immunology at Imperial College London before moving to complete a post-doc in respiratory infections at UCL. She joined Leucid Bio at its formation in 2017, developing several novel CAR T cell therapies which now form the basis of the company’s large IP portfolio. She currently heads a team in the CAR Engineering department focussing on developing nextgeneration armoured CAR T-cell therapies with boosted function and persistence in a wide range of solid tumours.

After a Master Degree in Biochnology and a PhD in immunology, Gianluca developed his carrieer at BDBiosceinces having currently the role of Scientific Affairs Manager. In his position he has a continuous exchange with key opinion leaders and experts in strategic fields for innovation, in order to support product development and market development at BDBioscience. He worked as scientific consultant to improve the scientific understanding regarding data associated with both released and potentially new BD products. He led selected studies aimed at generating scientific evidence for translational research products. He is currently author of 16 peer reviewed publications.

Dr. Paul Diehl joined Cellecta, Inc. in July 2010 where he applies over two decades of experience in biotechnology to developing and expanding the company’s commercial and collaborative activities.Prior to joining Cellecta, Dr. Diehl held various marketing and business development positions at B-Bridge International, Agilent Technologies, Clontech Laboratories, and other companies. Dr. Diehl received his B.A. in Biology from LaSalle University in Philadelphia, PA and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Washington State University in Pullman, WA.

Mark gained his PhD at the University of Strathclyde in 2015, before spending 5 years as a postdoctoral research associate working on various projects including investigations into potential therapies for multiple sclerosis. He joined Concept Life Sciences/Malvern Panalytical in 2020 as a Senior Scientist within the Immunology team at our Edinburgh site. His main role is to act as Study Director, managing client projects throughout the full study lifecycle.

Chuan is the EU Business Head of Sanyou Biopharmaceuticals heading pre-clincal candidate to IND stage CRO services and a team of sales. Prior to joining Sanyou Bio, Chuan has worked for Biomarker Technologies and Charles River as Sales Supervisor and Director of Sales. Chuan obtained his Master of Science degree from West South University in China with double major in Biochemistry and Molecular Biologics.

Angelo obtained his PhD in Pharmacology at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain). After that, he spent time at the NIH (USA), UNIFESP (Brazil), MUSC (USA), University of Plymouth , University of Leeds, and University of Cambridge (UK). Angelo worked with brain lipid signalling, intracellular calcium signalling, oxygen sensing, hypoxia, cardiac physiology, Alzheimer’s, nociception, malignant hyperthermia, antidepressant screening, antinociceptive drugs, mechano-sensitivity of ion channels, white matter, hypoxia, and gut mechano-sensitivity. In 2019 Angelo moved in a commercial role and since February 2023 he is working at Lunaphore.

Professor Colin Self is CEO of Precision Immunotherapeutics Ltd, UK and Emeritus Professor at Newcastle University. His career largely focusses around the diagnostic and therapeutic uses of antibodies, their efficacy, their specificity and consequences of their clinical use.  Following his desire to find means of increasing the specificity of therapeutic antibodies he developed and introduced the concept of light activation of antibodies with his early publication in Nature Medicine. This was followed by specific application to the human killer T-cell system wherein it was demonstrated that antibodies capable of achieving T-cell stimulation could be rendered inactive until illuminated by low intensity, long wavelength ultra-violet light. Thus T-cell activation could be stimulated within the body where and when required by illumination. This was taken forward by incorporation of the technology into bispecific antibodies, allowing anti-tumour antibodies to be fitted with a T-cell activating warhead that not only activated T-cells but did it only in the vicinity of targeted tumour, thus increasing the functional targeting specificity of the anti-cancer antibodies. He has now taken this forward with a new raft of technology aimed at the dramatic reduction of patient side-effects and welcomes collaboration.

Ian Pike is the Chief Scientific Officer at Proteome Sciences and has over 30 years’ experience working in the diagnostics and biotechnology sectors. Since joining Proteome Sciences in 2002 he has held a number of roles covering intellectual property management, business development, operational management and is now focused on leading the Company’s scientific strategy to offer clients a flexible, high-quality service.

Valerie Balme is Associate Director, Pharma Business Development at Veracyte; she has over 10 years’ experience working in the diagnostics and biotechnology industry. First at Ipsogen, then at Qiagen and HalioDx and now with Veracyte she has held several roles covering customer service, manufacturing & operations management and is currently focused on business development in Veracyte Biopharma Business Unit offering their Pharma partners a flexible and high-quality service.

Dr Anna Säll is a Senior Scientist at Alligator Bioscience since 2016 and works with projects in discovery, responsible for the antibody generation platform, including Alligator Bioscience antibody libraries, and lead optimization processes. Anna believes that the development of advantageous strategies to select drug candidates in regard to both function and developability is of high importance within the competitive field of immunooncology. Anna earned her PhD in 2015 at the Department of Immunotechnology at Lund University working with the design and construction of antibody libraries as well as the development of antibodies for proteomic platforms.

Andrew Sewell is a Distinguished Research Professor and Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, Cardiff University School of Medicine. His research aims to understand 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. Current research projects include: Dissection of successful immune responses after successful cancer immunotherapy or spontaneous remission; TCR gene transfer therapy (TCR-T); New 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.

Sophia Karagiannis is a translational cancer immunologist with academic and biotechnology experience in the USA and UK, specialising on antibody therapies for solid tumours. Her group has developed therapeutic antibody discovery to translation pathways, informed through dissecting B cells and the mechanisms of Th2 responses in cancer. Areas of research include deriving antibodies from human B cells, engineering antibodies of any specificity or class/isotype, and design of Fc-engineered antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates for cancer therapy. Her group is the first internationally to design, evaluate and translate anti-tumour IgE class antibodies to clinical testing. Sophia is a founder of IGEM Therapeutics Ltd, the first immuno-oncology company dedicated to developing IgE therapeutic agents for cancer. She serves as Secretary of the international AllergoOncology Task Force, a multidisciplinary consortium focused on the interface between allergies, IgE responses, and Th2 immunity, with cancer development since 2014.

Roberto De Luca graduated in Biology at ETH Zürich. He performed his PhD studies at ETH Zürich focusing on the generation of antibodycytokine fusion proteins for the treatment of tumors. Dr. De Luca is author of several peer-reviewed publications in international scientific journals.

John undertook his PhD in 2004 under the supervision of Dr. David Gilham and Prof. Robert Hawkins at the University of Manchester. During this time his main interest was uncovering the signalling and molecular interactions of chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) and development of novel costimulatory CARs. In 2010 John moved to the labs of Prof. David Price and Prof. Andrew Sewell at Cardiff University where he focussed on T-cell receptor (TC         R) gene transfer, using it as a tool to understand biological phenomena such as alloreactivity and TCR cross-reactivity, as well as further developing adoptive cell therapy strategies. In 2013 he was awarded a Wellcome Trust/NISCHR ISSF research fellowship within the Institute of Infection and Immunity at Cardiff University studying cross-reactivity profiles of virus specific T-cells. John has been Director of Cell Therapy Research at Immetacyte (formally Cellular Therapeutics) since 2014

from The University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2015 in the Department of Environmental Biotechnology and has 7+ years of experience in genomic and epigenomic research. Sarah helped develop and establish the targeted next generation bisulfite sequencing (tNGBS) workflow at EpigenDx Inc. Sarah’s expertise includes the development and validation of bisulfite sequencing assays, bisulfite conversion from various sample types, and the optimization of tNGBS panels. Sarah has experience in multiple areas of epigenomic research and a recent completion of a validated immunological tNGBS panel.

Sebastien Tabruyn holds a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Liege (Belgium). After 12 years as Project leader in renowned international academic research institutes, he joined TransCure bioservices , CRO in 2013 to develop the first immuno-oncology humanized mouse models. Sebastien’s research mostly focusses on oncology, inflammation, immunity and angiogenesis.

Dr. Rekdal is CEO and co-founder of Lytix Biopharma and has 20 years of scientific and clinical experience in the biotechnology and immuno-oncology industry. He has extensive research background within tumor immunology with a focus on oncolytic molecules and their abilities to induce potent tumor specific immune responses. Dr. Rekdal commenced his PhD on cytokines and tumor immunology in 1996. His postdoctoral work was focusing on oncolytic peptides and their abilities to induce potent tumor specific immune responses. This research forms the basis of Lytix Biopharma’s oncolytic peptide platform. Dr. Rekdal has been leading the collaboration with several distinguished researchers and institutions to further explore the unique ability of oncolytic molecules to reprogram non-inflamed or suppressive tumor microenvironment in experimental models and in cancer patients.

Sari Pesonen gained her PhD in biology from the University of Turku, Finland in 2007. She continued her academic career at the University of Helsinki and was awarded a three-year post-doctoral research post by the Academy of Finland. Sari is a co-author in 60+ peer-reviewed research papers and inventor of patented adenovirus based cancer immunotherapy currently in multiple Ph2 clinical trials in the US and Europe. She has worked in biotech companies Oncos Therapeutics and Targovax in scientific lead positions before co-founding a Helsinki University spin out company Valo Therapeutics.

Ahuva Nissim 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 semisynthetic human antibody library, the so call ‘Nissim’ library which has been used worldwide. In November 2000 she was appointed as a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University. Her studies are interdisciplinary and involve translational research at the William Harvey Research Institute and with intensive worldwide collaborations. Her studies have been mostly focused on the mechanisms that lead to the formation of disease tissue-specific pathogenic proteins and the exploitation of identified pathogenic proteins to develop platform technologies for novel disease - and tissue-specific, diagnosis and targeted treatment.

Samantha Bucktrout is currently the Vice President of Research Strategy at PsiOxus Therapeutics, where she works cross functionally to ensure the transformative platform brings benefit to solid tumor patients. Samantha’s previous role was Senior Director of Research and Development at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco. Prior to that Samantha served as Associate Director at Pfizer’s Cancer Immunotherapy Research Unit in San Francisco, leading discovery to clinic programs in oncology and autoimmunity. She has co-authored numerous patent applications and peer reviewed manuscripts. Samantha earned her Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K.

Barbara Maurer, Senior Scientist at OncoOne, focuses on targeting oxMIF in cancer and how anti-oxMIF therapy can support immunotherapies. Barbara received a PhD in Molecular Signal Transduction from the Medical University of Vienna/ Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Cancer Research. Before joining OncoOne, Barbara focused on the JAK/STAT signaling pathway in hematopoiesis and leukemogenesis during her PhD and postdoctoral work.

Prof. Paul W.H.I. Parren is dedicated to translating antibody biology and immunotherapy knowledge into innovative therapeutics and technologies. Prof. Parren obtained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 1992 after which he studied correlates of protection against viruses by human antibodies at Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA. From 2002-2017, he headed preclinical R&D at Genmab leading to the development of the approved therapeutic antibodies ofatumumab (Arzerra (2009), KESIMPTA (2020)), daratumumab (DARZALEX (2015)) and teprotumumab (Tepezza (2020)) and clinically translated technologies to generate bispecific and effector-function enhanced antibodies. He is a tenured Professor of Molecular Immunology at the Leiden University Medical Center in Leiden and he leads Sparring Bioconsult, an independent biotech consulting company. Since 2018, he is EVP and head of R&D at Lava Therapeutics where he develops novel bispecific gamma-delta T-cell engagers for cancer therapy.

Thomas Valerius studied medicine at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. After his training in internal medicine, he specialized in Hematology/Oncology and Rheumatology. Since May 2003, he has been working at the University in Kiel, Germany, where he currently is assistant professor at the Section for Stem Cell Transplantation and Immunotherapy. His main scientific interests have been effector functions of monoclonal antibodies in tumor therapy with recent focus myeloid checkpoint blockade and human IgA as alternative antibody isotype.

Dr. Andrea Bisso is Director of Pharmacology at Gadeta BV. He holds a PhD in Molecular Medicine from the University of Trieste (Italy). He has more than 15 years of research experience in academia and industry, focused on the understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of cancer that can be exploited for cancer treatment. At Gadeta he oversees the preclinical activities focused on the characterization of the efficacy, toxicology profile and mechanism of action of new tumor reactive γδTCRs, by leading internal activities and collaborations with external partners and CROs.