Gothenburg, Västra Götaland County, Sweden
I am a passionate scientist and team lead in the field of regenerative cell therapy and drug discovery with work experience in academia as well as in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry.
In my current role, I am involved in different projects exploring new siRNA-based targets for potential new drugs in cardiomyopathies.
In my role as Associate Principal Scientist in the Bioscience Cell Therapy department, I had to step out of my comfort zone (cardiac regeneration), diving into new therapy areas. In a big team effort, we optimized differentiation protocols for kidney organoids and established a workflow to evaluate CAR-T cells as novel potential therapeutics for Inflammatory Bowel Disease patients.
I was promoted to Senior Scientist for my contribution to the successful completion of the feasibility stage moving the company's Heart Failure program through the lead candidate stage gate.
In 2018, I joined the the Process Sciences department of the newly launched biotech company BlueRock Therapeutics, leading a team of scientists and research assistants for the up-scaled production of iPSCs and cardiomyocytes in bioreactors. After the acquisition by the Bayer AG, I helped establishing the Cardiac Cell Biology team as a new R&D entity within the Heart Failure program. At BlueRock, I have experienced the fast pace environment of a start-up company with tight timelines, learned how to standardize processes and protocols, and I have been involved in numerous cross-functional projects, including cellular maturation, cryopreservation, and the development of functional cell characterization assays.
I joined the Research Platform Degenerative Diseases at the German Primate Center to expand my skills in cell therapy while benefitting from my expertise in stem cell and cardiac biology. Here, I was responsible for the - at that time - challenging generation of NHP-iPSCs for allogeneic and autologous pre-clinical cell replacement studies in close collaboration with the Universitätsmedizin Göttingen and under the umbrella of the Deutsches Zentrum für Herz-Kreislauf-Forschung (DZHK). I initiated external collaborations, supervised and directed research assistants and graduate students to successfully complete the NHP-iPSC project. I volunteered as Young-DZHK Partner Site Coordinator and Representative of Early Career Scientists.
I continued my work on cardiac disease modeling using patient-specific iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes as a postdoc. I published and presented scientific results on international conferences, supervised undergraduate students, and successfully applied for an early career scientist grant. I initiated a collaborative project between the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM, Canada), Sartorius, and the Universitätsmedizin Göttingen, where I functionally characterized human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes cultivated in stirred-tank bioreactors.