Dr. Roland Pach holds a PhD in molecular parasitology at the University Fribourg analyzing the intracellular trafficking of transgenic RNA in human pathogens.

Prior Roche, he was leading the Analytical Development department at Berna Biotech (former Swiss Vaccine and Serum Institute) and the QC department of Bio-Process Development at Merck Serono.

Roland is the global CMC Analytical Technical Lead in the cancer vaccines and cell- & gene therapy (CGT) area of Roche more than 10 years. In his assigned area, he represents Roche in external development projects, industrial consortiums like CGT BioPhorum and numerous due diligences of in-licensing candidates or companies in the CGT fields.

In his second role at Roche as global technical development leader, he had led successfully new formats like immunotoxins from pre-clinics into entry to human (EiH).

Fethi Bensaid works as local head of drug product development at Sanofi mRNA CoE, based in Lyon, France. He has more than 12 years of experience within the biopharmaceutical industry in drug delivery and parenteral development of different modalities.

Before joining Sanofi mRNA CoE, he worked for more than six years in biologics drug product development at Sanofi Paris and led early and late-stage DP development programs.

Before joining Sanofi, he worked at LFB Paris, where he led the drug product development team focussing on recombinant and plasma proteins development. Previously, he was at Adocia Lyon, where his responsibilities involved developing innovative formulations for insulin products.

Fethi has a chemical engineer degree and a PhD in polymer chemistry applied for drug delivery from Paul Sabatier University, in Toulouse, France.

Francis Poulin is vice president of analytical sciences at Sail Biomedicines, a Flagship Pioneering company based in Cambridge, MA (USA). Francis leads the development of analytical procedures for Endless RNA™ (eRNA™), a uniquely engineered closed-loop RNA that was invented at Flagship Labs. Prior to Sail Biomedicines, he led analytical development teams at Lyell Immunopharma, Sanofi, and Genzyme, and contributed to several successful regulatory filings. Francis received his PhD in biochemistry from McGill University (Canada), where he worked with Prof. Nahum Sonenberg on the regulation of mRNA translation initiation.

Anna Särnefält joined the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) as CMC lead at the beginning of 2020. She previously worked as a team leader and senior scientist within process development of viral vectored vaccines at Bavarian Nordic A/S and has experience within antibody drug discovery from BioInvent AB following her MSc degree in chemical engineering (biotechnology) from the faculty of engineering at Lund University, Sweden.

Laurens Vergauwen is a process development scientist for Merck Group in EMEA. Laurens supports customers in the development and optimisation of various downstream purification technologies (chromatography, TFF, clarification, sterile and viral filtration). He has gained knowledge about purification strategies for different kinds of biopharmaceuticals, including viral vectors. He obtained his master's degree in industrial biochemical engineering at the University of Leuven (Belgium).

Holding a PhD in bio-engineering catalytic technology from KU Leuven, Roman’s journey at Pfizer spans over eight years, reflecting a versatile career path, ranging from engineering to production. For the past two years, he has stood at the forefront of innovation as process development manager in the experimental pilot plant in Puurs, as part of the mRNA technology group. As a certified six sigma green belt, Roman is a driving force behind critical investigations, contributing to the advancement of the LNP formulation process.

Dr. Xinyue (Frank) Zhang earned his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences – Institute of Chemistry. He's had the privilege of working at institutions such as the University of Missouri-Columbia and UST. For over 10 years, Xinyue has dedicated his research to nucleic acid-related areas, delving into aptamers, biosensors, nanopores, and mRNA process development. His findings have been published in reputable journals, including Nature Communications, JACS, and ACS Nano. In 2021, Xinyue joined GeneLeap Biotechnology, where he focusses on mRNA process and analytical development, along with manufacturing.

Dr. Camille Correia obtained her PhD at McGill University (Canada) under the supervision of professor Chao-Jun Li, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces with professor Peter H. Seeberger. Camille joined Merck in 2015 and is currently the head of reaction technology, with a focus on the development of continuous manufacturing processes.

For the last 19 years, Dr. Dennis Christensen has been working with pharmaceutical and immunological aspects of vaccine adjuvants and delivery systems, including targeted delivery of protein, peptide, and mRNA-based vaccines. He is a key opinion leader in the vaccine delivery research field and has an extensive experience with international vaccine research collaborations and with coordinating the research work in such projects. Dennis is leading Croda Pharma’s R&D efforts to offer of new and innovative vaccine delivery systems, immunostimulators, and combined adjuvant systems for the future.

Dr. Zoltán Kis is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at The University of Sheffield, and an Honorary Lecturer at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London.

Zoltán is leading a multidisciplinary team that is innovating and digitalising RNA vaccine and therapeutics production platform technologies. His work is addressing the challenges of producing large volumes of RNA-based vaccines and therapeutics, rapidly, at high quality and at low cost in a disease-agnostic manner.

Zoltán has previously worked as a Research Associate in the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub at Imperial College London. He obtained his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Imperial College London, UK, holds an M.Sc. in Applied Biotechnology and a B.Eng. in Chemical with Biochemical Engineering.

Dr. Mark Dickman obtained his PhD at the Krebs Institute at the University of Sheffield prior to joining a biotechnology company, Transgenomic LTD, where he developed analytical techniques, including DNA/RNA chromatography. Mark joined the department of chemical and biological engineering in 2003. He has over 25 years' experience in the development and application of analytical techniques to analyse nucleic acids. In particular, he focusses on the development of novel biological mass spectrometry and HPLC methods to characterise mRNA therapeutics/vaccines.

Steve Wolk is currently the vice president of chemistry and boulder site head for Editas Medicine, where he leads the process chemistry and analytical sciences and structural biology teams. His scientific teams are responsible for gRNA and mRNA manufacture and characterisation, conjugation chemistries, as well as analytical method development, QC, and stability testing, and biophysical and structure/function characterisation. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UC San Diego, where he received the Harold Urey Award. He completed his PhD work in biophysical chemistry under Dr. Ignacio Tinoco at UC Berkeley, where he used 2D-NMR and other spectroscopic techniques to characterise nonstandard DNA structures. He has also led analytical groups at a polymer company (Rohm and Haas) as well as numerous other biotechnology companies (NexStar, Invenux, Amgen, and SomaLogic), and has a broad background in analytical techniques used for the characterisation of both small and large molecules.

Ilaria Pettinati is group lead process development mRNA at Lonza Geleen. Before joining Lonza, she worked at eTheRNA Immunotherapies NV where she led the mRNA chemistry team. Previously she was at Oxford Biomedica focussing on process development in the field of lentiviral vectors and other biomolecules, including nucleic acids. Ilaria has a master’s in cellular and molecular biology and a PhD in biophysics in the field of drug discovery, obtained in collaboration with the University of Oxford, where she elucidated structural and mechanistic basis of RNA processing enzymes.

Scientist and entrepreneur with over 25 years of diversified pharmaceutical industry experience. Founder of SiSaf Ltd. Inventor / co-inventor of several drug delivery patents and pioneer of Bio-Courier technology.

Dr. Julen Oyarzabal has spent more than 20 years working in the drug discovery and biopharmaceutical industry. Julen started his career as a researcher at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and later he joined the University of Southampton (UK), where he got extensive experience in pharmaceutical chemistry and drug design. In 2001, Julen joined Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical’s R&D team, where he led several projects from a molecular design perspective in the CNS therapeutic area. Five years later, he set up and led the computational medicinal chemistry section at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO). In 2010, Julen joined the Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA) at the University of Navarra (Spain) to set up the small molecule discovery platform and led the molecular therapeutics program. From 2013-18 he was also director of translational sciences leading scouting activities, from the University Hospital and CIMA, as well as de-risking drug discovery processes; as a result, several collaborations have been established, as well as a license agreement, with big pharmaceutical companies.

Julen is co-inventor of more than 30 patents and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles. He (co-)led publications in prestigious journals such as Nature Comm, Angew Chem, or J Med Chem. In addition, he was on the board of directors for the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium (USA) for six years (as VP from 2020-22); and, for seven years, from 2012, he was member of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) experts’ panel. He is on the board of directors of four biotechnological companies and he is co-founder and CSO of Syngoi.

Julen received a bachelor’s in physical chemistry and a PhD in organic and pharmaceutical chemistry, extraordinary prize, from the University of the Basque Country (Spain).

Dr. Edina Csaszar joined Biomay as team lead mRNA development in April 2023. Her scientific team is responsible for the development of the manufacturing process and the analytical control procedures. Edina previously gained her experience in downstream processing and aseptic filling as deputy head of manufacturing of clinical trial material for vaccine development at Biomedizinische Forschung- und Bio-Produkte AG and in development and validation of analytical procedures for preclinical and clinical trial material in quality operations for chemistry, manufacturing and control at AFFiRiS AG in Vienna. Edina earned her PhD in structural investigation of post-translationally modified proteins by mass spectrometry at the University of Vienna.

Dr. Kate Loveday is a post-doctoral research associate in the department of chemical and biological engineering, at The University of Sheffield (UK). Kate is part of a multidisciplinary team, led by Dr Zoltán Kis and Prof. Mark Dickman, that is innovating RNA vaccine and therapeutic production platform technologies and analytical method development for the characterisation of mRNA drug products. Her work focusses on the development of upstream processes of RNA manufacturing and optimising the production of mRNA in continuous mode. She obtained her PhD in molecular and cellular biology from The University of Leeds, and also holds an MSc by research in molecular and cellular biology and a BSc (Hons) in biological sciences.