Pioneering antigen-agnostic TCR T cell therapies
Our Mission
Current immunotherapies do not offer therapeutic benefit for most cancer patients.
To overcome these limitations Tcelltech - founded by a team of clinicians and scientists from the German Cancer Research Center DKFZ - is developing UNIPACT: a novel personalized cell therapy.
UNIPACT combines two proprietary assets to generate a personalised cancer treatment:
• TCR discovery: rapid identification of patient-specific tumor-killing T cells and their TCR receptors using our proprietary antigen-agnostic selecTCR bioinformatic pipeline
• TCR delivery: our proprietary non-viral, non-integrating nanoSMAR vector that delivers tumor-killing TCRs to fresh patient T cells, equipping them to fight their cancer
UNIPACT is designed to fight all cancers. This therapy allows meeting time constraints set by even the most aggressive tumor types. In addition, UNIPACT kills tumor cells more effectively and safer than state-of-the-art therapies.
The Team
Tcelltech's Founders
Founder, CEO
Prof Dr Michael Platten
Michael is Chairman of the Department of Neurology at the Medical Faculty Mannheim (UMM, part of Heidelberg University), and Professor of Neuroimmunology and Brain Tumor Immunology at the DKFZ. He is consistently rated in the top 1% in his field worldwide. Recently, Michael was awarded the German Cancer Award (alongside BioNTech’s Ugur Sahin) for his achievements in cancer research.
Founder, Research
Dr Ed Green
Ed is a permanent staff scientist at the DKFZ, and inventor of numerous patents in molecular biology, bioinformatics and high throughput screening that underpin our selecTCR personalised oncology pipeline. Ed’s science has been published extensively in top scientific journals.
Ed’s focus is on scaling up and further developing Tcelltech’s pipelines to reach more patients sooner.
Founder, Vector Technology & Manufacturing
Dr Richard Harbottle
Richard leads the DKFZ’s DNA Vector research group, with over three decades of experience in the field of vector development, and gene and cell therapy. Richard is a co-inventor on numerous vector and SMAR technology patents and serves as Tcelltech’s main point of contact to industry, having longstanding collaborations with leading gene therapy companies in the field such as MaxCyte, Miltenyi, Lonza and Nature Technologies.
Co-Founder, Development
Prof Dr Rienk Offringa
Rienk leads the laboratory for molecular oncology of gastrointestinal tumors at the DKFZ and is also responsible for the DKFZ-Bayer Immunotherapeutics Laboratory. He brings 25 years of experience in translational cancer research, both in academia and in industry, including the development of cancer vaccines and immuno-oncology drugs.
Co-Founder, General Counsel
Dr Jochen Dieselhorst
Jochen has been a partner at the international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer for over twenty years, mainly focusing on international licensing, collaborations and M&A in the biotech and pharma industry. He has led the German healthcare sector group of Freshfields for many years and brings a vast amount of experience in deal-making in the biotech sector.
Jochen’s broad experience and skills have been crucial for Tcelltech in the negotiations of the spin-off from DKFZ. Moving forward, Jochen’s expertise will be critical in leveraging Tcelltech’s IP in license and collaboration agreements.
Co-Founder, Finance
Dr Mathias Turwitt
Mathias co-founded and led a mid-cap private equity company managing EUR 370m of assets from international institutional investors over multiple funding rounds. Besides investing in successful Mittelstand companies and being a member of the investment committee, he was also the CFO.
Mathias brings a wealth of experience, especially in business strategy, value creation and fundraising to the Tcelltech team. Within our team, he will focus on securing liquidity and reporting.
Business Development & Licensing
Dr Thomas Theelen
Thomas has was exposed to scaling-up biotech start-ups during his previous role as VP Corporate Development. He has experience in licensing transactions and business strategy. His PhD in Biomedical Sciences and MBA allow him to translate between the two worlds of science and business.
Within our team Thomas will be responsible of out-licensing, market intelligence, marketing and strategic projects.
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