With over 25 years of experience in the CDMO and biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry specialized in technologies like ADCs, Bioconjugates, recombinant Proteins, HPAPIs and Cell and Gene therapies I was fortunate to accompany more than 200 clinical projects including some successful commercial launches. I started my professional career with Sigma Aldrich (SAFC) now Merck Millipore moved to Lonza leading their Emerging Technology business unit. During this time the world’s largest Cell & Gene Therapy facility in Houston was constructed. The acquisition of PharmaCell^TM and a strategic collaboration with Nikon in Japan enabled Lonza to support customers and patients globally with service and solution offerings. With the acquisition of the automation technologies “Cocoon^TM“ we started to automate the highly manual manufacturing process. During this time numerous strategic customer agreements were signed positioning Lonza as the number one CDMO for late phase Cell & Gene therapy projects. The last 3 years I worked for Novartis where I was leading a global team identifying new strategic external partnerships, building a reliable global network of strategic manufacturing partners. My team completely redesigned and expanded the external autologous manufacturing footprint for Kymriah^TM from originally 1 to 4 commercial autologous manufacturing sites in Germany, Japan, Australia and China. In addition, the Viral Vector manufacturing for Kymriah^TM was switched to a new process significantly reducing the cost of manufacture.

I obtained Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the RWTH in Aachen and finished my Ph.D. with Summa Cum Laude in Organic Chemistry from the University of Freiburg.