Unlocking an expansive target space to build a pipeline of novel, TCR-based therapeutics.

Thomas L. Andresen was most recently the CSO of Torque Therapeutics, now Repertoire Immune Medicines, a company that has raised over $400m to support its primed adoptive cell transfer technology platform. While at Torque, Thomas led several cellular immunotherapy programs from early stage discovery, CMC scaling through to clinical development. Thomas is a serial entrepreneur, having founded several US and EU life-science companies including Torque Therapeutics, Nanovi A/S, and Monta Biosciences. His company creation track record spans early discovery through clinical development to commercial, and maps across immune and cellular therapy approaches in oncology. Thomas sits on several boards/advisory boards including Tidal Therapeutics (acquired by Sanofi), Monta Biosciences, and Nanovi.

His scientific background is in biomedical and biological engineering. His impact in academia recently culminated in establishing the Institute of Health Technology at the Technical University of Denmark with a patient-focused mission to innovate life changing health technologies. The Institute hosts over 500 researchers, and Thomas maintains a professorial position in drug engineering at the institute. He has co-authored over 200 research articles, is named on 45 patent applications and has received multiple research prizes including the Elite Research Price from the Danish Ministry of Science.

Mark joined T-Cypher as VP Corporate Development in June 2021. Mark joined from Mestag Therapeutics where, as VP Strategy and Operations, he supported the company through significant financing rounds and collaborative transactions. Prior to Mestag, Mark was VP Strategy and Operations at F-star Therapeutics supporting the development of their novel bispecific platform. Prior to that, Mark led executive operations at Immunocore, working on financing and leading strategic projects in support of Immunocore’s soluble TCR platform.

Mark holds a Masters of Biochemistry from the University of Oxford, a PhD in Genetics & Immunology from Imperial College London, and an MBA from the University of Oxford.

Nathaniel joined T-Cypher as Head of Computational Biology in April 2021. Prior to this, he led the early-stage computational work at Nucleome Therapeutics. Nathaniel's experience includes three years' work at Immunocore, leading work on TCR-based drug discovery databases and bioinformatics analysis pipelines. Nathaniel is passionate about using his cross-disciplinary experience to help bridge the gap between the computational and biological sciences.

Nathaniel holds a PhD in Genetics from the University of Leicester, an MSci in Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence from Loughborough University, and carried out post-doctoral research at the University of Birmingham studying the immune evasion mechanisms of pancreatic cancer.

Xiaoyan joined T-Cypher as Senior Scientist in October 2020. She has over 16 years of experience in molecular biology including 9 years in bead display and peptide library screen. Her two post-doc experiences were in molecular biology, immunology, and clinical trials. Before joining in, she is a Senior Scientist and team leader at Orbit Discovery, working on developing bead displayed peptide libraries and optimising the screen platform. She is keen to apply bead display technology in the development of T cell therapeutics.

Amalia joined T-Cypher in April 2022 as a Senior Bioinformatician. She has 7 years’ experience in analysing and interpreting multiomics (RNAseq, proteomics) datasets to extract useful insights in collaboration with the wet lab. Before joining the team, she was a computational biologist in GSK for 2 years, supporting target identification efforts and the analysis of NGS datasets.
Amalia holds a PhD from Imperial College London, having studied the relationship between cell size and gene expression using omics technologies. It is this knowledge that will contribute to bringing new TCR therapies to the clinic.

Hemza undertook a PhD in structural biology studying proteins involved in Mycobacterium tuberculosis cell wall synthesis at Birmingham University, gaining experience in a wide range of molecular biology, protein, and Biochemistry methods.

He then moved to Oxford University for a post-doctoral position at Oxford University's Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (WIMM) in the Human Immunology Unit, where he carried out research on lipid antigen presentation to CD1-restricted T cell subsets under the late Prof Vincenzo Cerundolo. At the WIMM he also worked on projects related to tumour microenvironment (in the context of IDO+ tumours); this allowed further experience in traditional T cell assays and molecular/cellular biology techniques and also acquire new techniques (especially novel genome editing methods).

After moving to Immunocore, he employed and mastered genome editing techniques to generate cellular models for pre-clinical projects and for the assessment of new technologies and their deployment in assay development. Hema also led genome editing and new technologies teams which helped in understanding the biology of antigen presentation (in a T cell context), the validation/de-validation of novel immunotherapy targets, and implementation of new assays for antigens/therapeutics/effector functions discovery.

Emaan joined T-Cypher in July 2021. As a budding scientist, Emaan is passionate about immune-oncology and has experience working with different adoptive T-cell therapies for solid tumours. She also has a keen interest in improving the safety and efficacy of immunotherapeutic techniques. At T-Cypher, Emaan is excited to contribute to the promising sphere of TCR-T cell therapies!

She holds an MSc in Neuroscience and Cognition from Utrecht University.

Thomas L. Andresen was most recently the CSO of Torque Therapeutics, now Repertoire Immune Medicines, a company that has raised over $400m to support its primed adoptive cell transfer technology platform. While at Torque, Thomas led several cellular immunotherapy programs from early stage discovery, CMC scaling through to clinical development. Thomas is a serial entrepreneur, having founded several US and EU life-science companies including Torque Therapeutics, Nanovi A/S, and Monta Biosciences. His company creation track record spans early discovery through clinical development to commercial, and maps across immune and cellular therapy approaches in oncology. Thomas sits on several boards/advisory boards including Tidal Therapeutics (acquired by Sanofi), Monta Biosciences, and Nanovi.

His scientific background is in biomedical and biological engineering. His impact in academia recently culminated in establishing the Institute of Health Technology at the Technical University of Denmark with a patient-focused mission to innovate life changing health technologies. The Institute hosts over 500 researchers, and Thomas maintains a professorial position in drug engineering at the institute. He has co-authored over 200 research articles, is named on 45 patent applications and has received multiple research prizes including the Elite Research Price from the Danish Ministry of Science.

Phil co-founded Borealis Ventures in 2002 and has led the firm’s healthcare investing from its inception. He currently leads Borealis’ investments in Adimab, Amagma, Avitide, Compass Therapeutics, Evox Therapeutics, Orbit Discovery, Ovation.io, Teckro, and T-Cypher Bio. Phil's prior investments include Avedro (IPO, then acquired by Glaukos), GlycoFi (acquired by Merck & Co.), M2S (acquired by AIG Altaris Health Partners), and Vets First Choice (Nasdaq: CVET).

Phil has also spent over 20 years advancing innovation ecosystems at Dartmouth College and other universities. He is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, teaching venture capital topics.

Phil received an A.B. degree from Dartmouth College, a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, and a M.B.A. (with High Distinction) from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Graham developed the bead display technology at the University of Oxford where he runs a laboratory investigating the role of T cells in disease and how such knowledge can be applied for patient benefit. He is Co-Founder and SAB Chair of T-Cypher Bio.

Graham developed the bead display technology at the University of Oxford where he runs a laboratory investigating the role of T cells in disease and how such knowledge can be applied for patient benefit. He is Co-Founder and SAB Chair of T-Cypher Bio.

Tao Dong has held the post of Professor of Immunology in the MRC Human Immunology Unit at Oxford University since 2014 and is a Senior Fellow at University College Oxford. She served as a member of the UK Medical Research Council Infection and Immunity board between 2016-2020. She is founding director of CAMS Oxford joint international Centre for Translational Immunology since 2013 and founding director (Oxford) of CAMS Oxford Institute based in Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford University since 2019.
Tao originally gained a BSc degree in Physiology from Fudan University, Shanghai, China in 1987. She moved to Oxford University in 1993 where she received a DPhil degree in Immunology in 1998 for work carried out under the supervision of Professors Sarah Rowland-Jones and Sir Andrew McMichael on qualitative changes in HIV-specific cytotoxic T cells associated with HIV disease progression. During her postdoctoral training, where she continued to study immune responses to HIV, she expanded her research interests to include work on influenza virus infection, which led her to start her own independent research group. In 2010 she became the Head of the human anti-viral and anti-cancer cytotoxic T cell laboratory and subsequently Program Leader in the MRC Human Immunology Unit at Oxford University. Since 2013, her research has expanded to cancer, with a central goal being to identify determinants of the ability of human tumour-specific cytotoxic T cells to control human tumour development and metastasis. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tao’s team has been working with colleagues in Oxford, UK and in China, testing samples taken from SARS-Cov-2 positive patients and trying to understand why some people with a COVID-19 infection are able to fight it off successfully, while others get really ill.

Andrew McMichael has worked on T cell immune responses to virus infections in humans since 1977. He was first to demonstrate virus specific HLA restricted T cells in humans and later identified the first peptide epitopes presented by HLA class I molecules. His group were then first to show that HIV could escape T cell responses by mutating peptide epitopes so that their presentation by HLA molecules was altered. He and others have since showed that this is a major feature of T cell responses to HIV. Differences in how viruses can tolerate escape mutations, differing in people with different HLA types, can explain why certain HLA types are associated with better immune control. He has been a pioneer in development of HIV vaccine strategies that include stimulation of T cell responses and has been helped conduct several clinical studies and trials.

He and colleagues were first to show in 1998 that the non-classical non-polymorphic HLA class I molecule HLA-E presented a particular signal peptide to the natural killer cell receptor NKG2-CD94. Recently, it has been found that certain pathogens stimulate T cell responses restricted by HLA-E and his group have explored and explained how HLA-E can bind low affinity peptides to stimulate protective T cell responses. He has shown this to be the case in HIV and also SARS-CoV-2 infection. He has showed that such T cell responses are favoured when the processing of the signal peptide, which binds with higher affinity, is blocked. This opens up the possibility of universal immunotherapies targeting HLA-E with pathogen, self and cancer peptides, that he and his group are actively exploring.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nicola Ternette trained in Physics and Biochemistry at the Universities of Bonn, Greifswald and Bochum in Germany. She pursued her post-graduate studies in developing and evaluating DNA vaccines for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) at the Institute for Molecular and Medical Virology in Bochum in the laboratory of Professor Klaus Überla. Following her PhD, she specialized in sequencing of HLA-associated peptidomes using nanoflow ultra-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS) at the University of Oxford with the focus on identification of viral antigens for the development of T cell vaccines. Since 2015, she is heading the Antigen Discovery Group at Oxford. Her group has expanded their expertise to deep sequencing of immunopeptidomes in multiple pathogen infection models, analysis of the antigenic landscape of solid tumours and haematological cancers and characterisation of antigens involved in autoimmune diseases. Her team is interested in understanding of the consequences of interference with the antigen presentation machinery on MHC presentation, and to interrogate the effect of tumour irradiation on the MHC presentation pathway. The group is further refining existing approaches to understand disease association with the MHC gene locus and are developing novel bioinformatics approaches to MS spectral interpretation for tumour-specific (neo)antigen discovery.

Cassian completed his medical degree in Canada, followed by an internal medicine residency at Stanford before going on to an oncology fellowship at the University of Washington. Following this, Cassian reached the position of Professor at the University of Washington and Full Member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre. Cassian’s research over the last 20 years has been focused on developing immune-based therapies for the treatment of patients with cancer. He is a pioneer in adoptive cell transfer (ACT). This involves the isolation of rare tumour antigen-specific T cells from the peripheral blood, manipulation of immune modulating factors to enhance their effector function and in vivo persistence and, expansion to numbers sufficient for adoptive transfer.