Benjamin Rengstl
Dr. Benjamin Rengstl is a trained physician and biochemist. Since 2009, he is exploring the potential of the immune system to combat cancer and infectious diseases. Between 2014 and 2016, he received his approbation as well as a PhD and a MD degree from the University of Frankfurt, Germany. During his postdoctoral training, he developed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered T-cell therapies against lymphomas and got trained in clinical pathology. In 2017, he joined BioNTech SE located in Mainz to develop a clinical CAR-T cell candidate for treatment of solid tumors. To improve CAR-T cell therapy, his team pioneered an in vivo expansion concept based on a liposomally formulated RNA vaccine for systemic delivery of CAR antigen (CAR T-cell Amplifying RNA Vaccine, CARVac). A FIH clinical trial assessing BioNTech´s novel CLDN6-specific CAR in combination with CARVac is currently ongoing. Furthermore, he is leading multiple programs to develop next generation cell- and RNA-based immunotherapies and further takes technology agnostic approaches to create new strategies for controlled modulation of the immune system.
Behnam Sadeghi
Behnam Sadeghi graduated as medical doctor (MD) in 1995. Dr Sadeghi did his PhD in transplantation Immunology in 2009 at Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. Since then, Dr Sadeghi’s research concentrated in the field of cell therapy and regenerative medicine both in clinical practice and experimental models. Dr Sadeghi established and applied decidua stromal cells (DSC) for the treatment of steroid refractory GVHD, ARDS and other acute inflammatory disorders in man. Other cell therapy modalities including bone marrow, adipose derived mesenchymal stromal cells (BM, Ad-MSC) are among his research interest. Currently, Dr Sadeghi is head of Translational Cell therapy Research group (TCR) at the department of CLINTEC, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
Bakul Gupta
Dr Bakul Gupta is the CEO and Co-founder of ImmTune Therapies, a preclinical stage cell therapy biotech which is developing safe, scalable and affordable in vivo cell therapies. The company is leveraging its unique platform to effectively deliver genetic cargoes directly to targeted cells, and applying it across different indications in cell and gene therapies.
Bakul founded the company in 2019, along with her business partner, Dr George Tetley after a 6-month long research into the challenges faced by current cell and gene therapy companies. She holds a PhD and BSc in Nanotechnology and Chemistry from the UNSW Australia, and finished her postdoctoral training with Prof. Molly Stevens at Imperial College London before starting ImmTune Therapies.
She has over 10 years of experience in designing nano- and bio-materials for a diverse set of biomedical applications and has previous experience in commercialisation of medical devices. She was recently listed as the Top 30 biotech entrepreneurs to watch as part of a report produced by BioBeat.
Anna Koptina
Andrea Braun- Scherhag
22nd June Presentations
Mark Kurtz
Leader of ML and engineering teams focused on the design, development, and implementation of cutting-edge technologies and products. With over 12 years of experience in software engineering and machine learning, well-practiced in building and managing teams for both closed source and open source software solutions. Currently the Director of Machine Learning at Neural Magic, Mark is focused on lowering the cost, improving the performance, and increasing the adoption of deep learning technologies through SOTA research and engineering. An active GitHub contributor, blogger, and researcher with published papers in top ML conferences.
Neural Magic
