Strategic partnering to enable cell therapy commercialization

Jenessa trained at the University of Pennsylvania under Daniel J. Powell Jr., studying CAR/TCR T cell product development. Jenessa also started a veterinary clinical trial for CD20-CART treatment of lymphoma in pet dogs in collaboration with Nicola Mason. After finishing her PhD, she spent time in San Diego at Poseida Therapeutics and moved up to San Francisco in 2019. Jenessa's current team is responsible for end-to-end process development for Arsenal Bioscience's CART pipeline.

Xavier de Mollerat du Jeu, Ph.D. is the Senior Director of Research and Development in the Cell and Gene Therapy business unit at Thermo Fisher Scientific, developing new products and solutions for cell therapy manufacturing. Prior to this, Xavier was the director of R&D cell and gene therapy in Carlsbad, California, working on developing new closed modular platforms for the clinical manufacture of T cells. Xavier also identified new DNA delivery approaches for hard to transfect cell lines and primary/stem cells and he is the inventor of Lipofectamine® 3000 and the author of several patents around nucleic acid delivery. Additionally, his research focused on new delivery solutions for CRISPR delivery, scalable lentiviral production solutions, mechanical delivery approaches for primary T cells and in vivo delivery of RNAi/mRNA for research and therapeutic application. His team is dedicated to bringing new viral and non-viral delivery solutions for T cells engineering and manufacturing, including automation and closed systems. Xavier studied molecular biology and plant physiology at the University of Montpellier II in France and received his Ph.D. in human genetics in 2003 from Clemson University in South Carolina. His thesis work involved identifying the gene(s) responsible for Split Hand/Split Foot Malformation 3 (SHFM 3). His post-doctoral fellowship research was in the laboratory of Dr. Michael G. Rosenfeld at UCSD, where he studied the roles of microRNAs in pituitary gland development. He joined Invitrogen (Life Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific) in 2005.