Jun Xu

Dr. Jun Xu joined Verismo Therapeutics as Senior Director of Translational Science. She has extensive experience from process development, drug product characterization to translational studies in T cell immunotherapy. After earning her Ph.D in Microbiology and Immunology from Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, she joined as a translational researcher in Product Development Laboratory, Center for Cellular Immunotherapies, at the University of Pennsylvania, in which she focused on understanding of the resistance and response to CAR T therapy in patients with hematological malignancies. In addition, she led development of a novel T cell activation strategy to augment the potency of T cell therapy products and later resulted in co-inventorship. Dr. Xu was then promoted to Associate Director at the same laboratory. In this role, she supervised process development and product characterization of both autologous and allogenic T cell therapy products in IND-enabling studies, contributing to successful IND submission. Moreover, she oversaw research activities of characterizing drug products derived from patients and investigation into development of predictive T cell biomarkers from starting materials and/or drug products in T cell immunotherapy trials. More recently, she served as VP of Process Development and Clinical Studies at UTC Therapeutics where she created the department and established bioanalytical platforms for correlative studies including evaluating the efficacy and safety of cell therapy products in patients. Dr. Xu first- or co-authored several manuscripts on the top journals including Nature Medicine, Nature, Blood and Seminars in Cancer Biology. She received a BS in Applied Biology from Zhejiang University (China) and a MS in Biology from New York University.