Esther Breij, PhD

Vice President, Head of Translational Research at Genmab BV

Speaker

Esther Breij has worked on the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies since 2008, with a focus on oncology. She currently leads the global Translational Research department at Genmab. She works with a team of non-clinical safety experts, translational research leads, scientists, research associates, scientific writers and other experts to bring novel antibody therapeutics into the clinic. Her team is responsible for design and execution of the non-clinical safety strategy across the Genmab portfolio, ranging from new formats and technologies to late-stage clinical development. Moreover, her team designs and executes the translational strategy for novel antibody compounds in preclinical and clinical development, including the biomarker strategy for first-in-human trials. In addition, Genmab’s scientific communication department, which is embedded in Esther’s team, provides scientific communication and writing expertise for antibody engineering, discovery and development teams, including regulatory documents, patent application, literature studies, posters, presentations, scientific manuscripts.

Esther has also worked at AIMM therapeutics from 2009-2011, focusing on discovery of patient-derived antibodies for the treatment of infectious disease and cancer. Prior to that, Esther worked as a post-doc in the Department of Cell Biology (Utrecht University) and Molecular Cell Biology and Immunology (VUMC Amsterdam). Esther was trained as an immunologist, and obtained her PhD from the Amsterdam UMC (VUMC), and completed her MSc at Utrecht University and the University of Texas.