“Recent Advances in Yeast Biotechnology – From Humanized Yeast, to Synthetic Immune Systems in Yeast, to …”
Tillman Gerngross
Professor of Engineering
Dartmouth College
Friday, April 15, 2011
3:00 p.m., Room 34-101
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tillman Gerngross, Ph.D., is a professor of bioengineering at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College and an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology and Chemistry at Dartmouth. He has been an active innovator and entrepreneur, and to date has founded several venture backed companies including GlycoFi, Adimab and more recently Arsanis. His work has been frequently cited in the popular press including The Times (London), CNN, Scientific American, BBC, The Guardian, The Economist, New Scientist, Nature Biotechnology and the Los Angeles Times. He joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 1998 with a research focus on protein engineering, glycoprotein engineering in yeast, and life cycle analysis of competing manufacturing technologies. At GlycoFi Gerngross and his team developed a method for humanizing the glycosylation machinery in yeast to produce human therapeutic proteins, including antibodies, with fully human carbohydrate structures. In 2006 Merck acquired the company for a record-setting $400 million. The same year Nature Biotechnology named Gerngross as one of the most notable people in Biotechnology in the past ten years. In the fall of 2006 Gerngross joined SV Life Science (formerly Schroder Ventures Life Science) as a Venture Partner to advise on investment opportunities in the bio-therapeutics area. In 2007 Gerngross co-founded Adimab, which over the past four years has developed a premier antibody discovery technology. In the last two years the company has signed partnerships with many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, and in 2010 was awarded the Technology Pioneer award by the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Gerngross received a M.S. (Dipl. Ing.) in Chemical Engineering (1989) and later a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria (1993). Following his studies in Austria he became a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA) in the laboratory of Arnold Demain (1989-91) and later joined the laboratory of Anthony Sinskey and Joanne Stubbe at MIT as a Postdoctoral Associate from 1991 to 1993.