Understanding and leveraging cord blood bank capabilities and practices in cell therapy development

Joy Aho, PhD, is the Senior Product Manager at Be The Match BioTherapies®, where she develops innovative products and best-in-class services for the cell and gene therapy industry. Prior to joining the team, she worked in product development and management at Bio-Techne for 13 years designing pioneering clinical and discovery tools for the development of celland gene therapies.

Aho received her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology & Genetics from the University of Minnesota, and her research led her to studying the role of TGFß family proteins during embryonic development utilizingstem cells and developmental models.

Amanda Conerty is the Executive Director of Process, Analytical Development and Manufacturing at Artiva Biotherapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company dedicated to delivering highly effective, off-the-shelf, allogeneic, natural killer cell-based therapies. Amanda is an ASCP-certified clinical laboratory scientist with more than 20 years of experience in cell therapy development and manufacturing. In her current role at Artiva, she leads the process development, analytical development, manufacturing, and supply chain operations for cell products across all development programs. Prior to Artiva, Amanda spent more than 8 years at Fate Therapeutics, where she held positions of increasing responsibilities in the CMC group, culminating in her position as Senior Director of Manufacturing and Quality Control.

Prior to Fate, Amanda managed a clinical Blood and Marrow Transplant program at the University of Louisville Brown Cancer center where she led both the apheresis department and BMT lab, while also overseeing Quality for both the pediatric transplant lab and the University GMP research lab. Amanda also operated as a Clinical Application Specialist at Baxter Healthcare supporting their CD34 cell therapy programs in cardiac and limb ischemia and spent 5 years at St Jude Children’s Research hospital in the clinical cell therapy lab, developing research cell therapy programs for clinical applications. Amanda holds a BS in Clinical Laboratory Science and a Graduate Certificate in Reproductive Laboratory Science from the University of Kentucky.