SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Academics

Katalin Karikó is professor at University of Szeged and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for 24 years. She is former senior vice president at BioNTech SE, Mainz, Germany, where she worked between 2013-2022. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Szeged, Hungary, in 1982. For four decades, her research has been focusing on RNA-mediated mechanisms with the ultimate goal of developing in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered that nucleoside modifications suppress immunogenicity of RNA, which widened the therapeutic potentials of mRNA. Her patents, co-invented with Drew Weissman on nucleoside-modified uridines in mRNA provided the foundation to create the FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna.

Norbert Pardi

Dr. Norbert Pardi holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and genetics. He has been working at the University of Pennsylvania since 2011. His research interest is the development of mRNA-based therapeutics with particular focus on new generation vaccines. He explored the development of a novel protein delivery platform using nucleoside-modified mRNA in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) and used it to generate highly effective mRNA-LNP vaccines targeting various pathogens.

Daniel J. Siegwart

Daniel J. Siegwart is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Biochemistry, and the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center (SCCC) at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He holds the W. Ray Wallace Distinguished Chair in Molecular Oncology Research and serves as the Director of the Program in Genetic Drug Engineering, Director of the Drug Delivery Program in Biomedical Engineering, and Co-leader of the Chemistry and Cancer Program in the NCI-designated SCCC. He received a B.S. in Biochemistry from Lehigh University (2003), and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University (2008), studying with Professor Krzysztof Matyjaszewski. He also studied as a Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo with Professor Kazunori Kataoka (2006). He then completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT with Professor Daniel Anderson and Professor Robert Langer (2008-2012). His research laboratory utilizes materials chemistry to enable targeted nanoparticle delivery of genomic medicines. Their efforts led to an understanding of the essential physical and chemical properties of synthetic carriers required for therapeutic delivery of siRNA, miRNA, tRNA, pDNA, mRNA, and gene editors. His lab has been at the forefront in the design of synthetic carriers for gene editing and has applied these technologies for correction of genetic diseases and treatment of cancer. They reported the first non-viral system for in vivo CRISPR/Cas gene editing. Recently, they developed Selective ORgan Targeting (SORT) lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which was the first strategy for predictable tissue specific mRNA delivery and gene editing. They ultimately aspire to utilize chemistry and engineering to make a beneficial impact on human health.

Galit Alter

Galit Alter, PhD, is the Vice President of Immunology Research at Moderna. She spent 20 years at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard where she developed new tools to define correlates of immunity against a range of viral, bacterial, and parasitic infections to inspire next generation vaccines and therapeutics. She now leads efforts within Moderna to both define the mechanism of action of mRNA vaccines as well as to develop novel strategies to engineer immunity to promote highly effective immune responses across populations and across the globe.

CureVac

Markus Zettl

Markus Zettl, PhD has more than 15 years experience in research and development in the area of Immuno-Oncology bringing multiple drug candidates to the clinic as well as providing preclinical and translational support for Phase 1 to 2 clinical studies. Before joining CureVac as Vice President leading the Oncology Research & Development organisation, he worked at Boehringer Ingelheim and the mid-size Pieris Pharmaceuticals. Furthermore, he held academic positions at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) Cambridge and performed his Ph.D at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg and CRUK, London. Throughout his career he published several high impact publications including Cell and Science and is an inventor on multiple patents.

Patrick Baumhof

Patrick Baumhof, PhD
Senior Vice President Technology
trained in Chemistry, at the University of Leipzig. His scientific expertise includes chemistry, pharmaceutical sciences and immunology. He joined CureVac in July 2007 when he was responsible for the development and preclinical testing of new formulations for mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. He is inventor of several patents and he co-authored several publications on mRNA technology. Currently he is Senior Vice President Technology at CureVac AG.

Moderna

Laura Walker

Laura M. Walker

Laura Walker, PhD, is an experienced biochemist and immunologist with a strong background in infectious disease research and antibody therapeutics. She earned a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. in Immunology and Microbiology from The Scripps Research Institute, focusing on broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV-1.

She currently serves as Executive Director of ID Immunology and Translational Research at Moderna, overseeing scientific strategy for infectious disease mRNA vaccines. Previously, she led infectious disease biotherapeutic discovery at Moderna and was Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Invivyd, Inc. She also served as Senior Director of Antibody Sciences at Adimab, LLC, leading research on antibodies targeting viral pathogens, including Ebola, Zika, and SARS-CoV-2.

Eckhard Jankowsky

Eckhard Jankowsky is the Vice President of RNA Science at Moderna. He has continuously worked for the last three decades on RNA-related topics ranging from RNA chemistry, biochemistry to biology. Before joining Moderna in 2022, Dr. Jankowsky was a Professor and the Director of the Center for RNA Science and Therapeutics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. Dr. Jankowsky has published more than 100 research papers, reviews and book chapters, including high impact articles in Cell, Science, and Nature, and he has edited two books.

BioNTech

Mathias Vormehr

Dr. Mathias Vormehr, Senior Director Cancer Vaccines, is an immunologist currently leading the preclinical research on mRNA therapeutics such as next-generation personalized cancer vaccines or RNA-encoded cytokines at BioNTech. He performed his diploma thesis on immunotherapy at the German Cancer Research Center Heidelberg and received a doctorate in pharmacy from the University of Mainz. His work resulted in several patent applications as well as high impact publications in journals like Nature.

Mustafa Diken

Dr. Mustafa Diken received his Ph.D. in tumor immunology from Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz and is currently serving as the Deputy Director of Immunotherapy Development Center at TRON and Vice President of Vaccines & Immunology at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals. His research focuses on the development of novel cancer and infectious disease vaccines based on antigen-encoding messenger RNA (mRNA) and the elucidation of immunomodulatory mechanisms for immunotherapy. His other scientific interests include assay development for preclinical testing of vaccines. Dr. Diken is also the scientific program director of the Association for Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT), a non-profit organization aimed at advancing cancer immunotherapy.