Christian Klein

ESTP Congress
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Christian Klein, Distinguished Scientist, is Department Head Cancer Immunotherapy Discovery 3, Head Oncology Programs & Site Head Roche Innovation Center Zurich, Roche pRED. He specializes in the discovery, engineering, validation and preclinical development of therapeutic/bispecific antibodies for CIT.

During his 21 year Roche tenure he made major contributions to the preclinical development & approval of obinutuzumab/GAZYVA(RO), project initiation & discovery of faricimab/VABYSMO and preclinical R&D on 24 clinical stage BsAbs, immunocytokines and fusion proteins. He lead(s) research teams developing pRED’s BsAb platforms e.g. CrossMab®, 2+1 TCB, 4-1BB/CD28 costimulator, immunocytokine, next gen biologics, the P329G-CAR®-T platform licenced to Innovent, and contributed to research on teprotumumab/TEPEZZA and Nutlin MDM2i.

1998 he received a diploma in biochemistry from University of Tübingen working at the MPI for Biology, and 2002 a doctorate from TU Munich working on p53-MDM2 at the MPI of Biochemistry with Robert Huber and Roche. 2002 he joined Pharma Research, Roche Penzberg as Postdoc in the Therapeutic Protein Initiative, 2003 became Lab and 2007 Department Head in Discovery Oncology. 2010 he joined RICZ as Head Oncology Programs, and took on additional roles 2015 as Department Head CIT-3 and 2019 as Site Head. 2017 he completed his habilitation in Biochemistry and acts as lecturer at the LMU Munich, since 2021 he is also lecturing at the University of Zürich.

He co-authored >190 publications, contributed to >200 patent families, is an associate editor of mAbs, antibodies, Fonc, Fimmu and Successful Drug Discovery, and co-organized the Keystone Antibodies as Drugs Symposium 2019 and GBM‘s Mosbacher Kolloquium Immune Engineering 2023. He received the Drug Discovery of the Year 2015 award by the British Pharmacological Society and several Roche pRED, Roche Award of Excellence and Inventors’ Gold Medal awards.