Therese Choquette

Head of Analytical and Translational Sciences at Tigen Pharma

Speaker

Therese Choquette has a long-standing experience in Cell and Gene Therapy and Analytical Development; from early development into the commercial space. She started at Novartis in 2014 to lead the potency assay development group for the newly transferred CAR-T product (now named Kymriah) from University of Pennsylvania and later entered the role of analytical project leader. After 6 years at Novartis, Therese moved on to Janssen Pharmaceuticals as Analytical Scientific Integrator for vaccines and cell therapy products, and thereafter to Iovance Biotherapeutics as Director for the Global QC working with TIL cells. She is now at Tigen Pharma as the Head of Analytical and Translational Sciences, focusing on early development of T cell therapy products. As a former Licensed Practical Nurse (in Sweden), her passion is to provide high quality cell therapies to patients and is having a deep interest in elucidating what constitutes a high-quality cell therapy product and to provide the best analytical methods for this. Therese earned a PhD in Rheumatology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and during her PhD project she studied the immune system and cells from humans (patients with rheumatic diseases) and for her post doc (in Prof Kornfeld’s group at UMass Medical School in Worcester, now UMass Chan Medical School) she studied the impact of hyperglycemia on host defense against mycobacterium tuberculosis.