Luis Álvarez-Vallina

Co-Founder and scientific advisor. Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering, Immunotherapy and Cell Engineering Laboratory, Aarhus University (Denmark). Luis attended Medical School at Oviedo University (Asturias, Spain) and completed a residency in Immunology at the Clínica Puerta de Hierro (Madrid).

Luis earned a PhD in Immunology from the Autónoma University of Madrid (UAM) working on T cell development in the human thymus and spent four years at the Medical Research Council Centre for Protein Engineering (Cambridge, UK) where he worked with Robert E. Hawkins, Stephen J. Russell, and Greg Winter.

His work contributed to the first generation of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) with costimulatory domains. In 1998, he established his research group at the Hospital Universitario Puerta de Hierro (Madrid) focusing on the generation of multispecific antibodies for cancer immunotherapy.

His experience includes generation of phage display platforms to select human recombinant antibodies in vivo in tumor-bearing mice (in vivo phage antibody display) and in vitro on complex antigen mixtures expressed on tumor cell surfaces (T lymphocyte display), and the development and preclinical testing of cancer immunotherapy strategies based on the adoptive transfer of genetically engineered cells secreting bispecific antibodies.