Laurent Humeau, PhD
Laurent M. Humeau is the Vice President of Research and Development at VIRxSYS. He leads a multi-disciplinary group composed of talented researchers with extensive expertise in cell biology, animal models, stem cells, immunology and lentiviral vector design. The core mission of the R & D department is to focus on developing advanced HIV-based lentiviral gene transfer systems for clinical applications as well as expanding and improving the company’s patent portfolio and product pipeline in the areas of cancer immunotherapies, therapeutic vaccines, genetic diseases and direct injectable lentivectors. The R&D group is also actively involved in scaling up transduction and expansion processes suitable for cGMP large scale cell processing operations, and working on process improvements.
Laurent has over 13 years of experience in the field of cell and gene therapies. He conducted his graduate studies at the Cellular and Molecular Institute of Embryology at Nogent-Sur-Marne, France, at the Department of Gene Transfer and Cellular Therapy at the Institute Paoli-Calmettes Cancer Center in Marseille, France, and at the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, working on the characterization and the transduction methods of primitive human hematopoietic progenitor cells. After receiving his Ph.D. in Blood Cell Biology (Summa Cum Laude) from the University Denis Diderot, Paris, France, he did his post doctoral work at the University of California at San Francisco at the Fetal Treatment Center, pursuing the ex-vivo genetic manipulation of human hematopoietic stem cells for the treatment of life threatening diseases. Since he joined VIRxSYS Corporation in early 2000, Laurent has been in charge of the development of new and highly efficient transduction procedures for human primary lymphocytes or stem cells that are clinically translatable, as well as the development of in vitro and/or in vivo assays that are used for the generation of data for the clinical trials. His group has also been in charge of the design and implementation of the large scale cell processing, related quality control procedures currently used in the company phase II clinical trials, and the implementation of the immunological assays for patient monitoring.
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