Date: Tuesday April 29, 2025
Time: 10:00am – 11:00am
Location: Donnelly Centre
160 College Street, 2nd Floor, Red Seminar Room
Speaker: Dr. Gregory De Crescenzo, PhD Polytechnique Montréal
The market of therapeutic recombinant proteins is now dominated by monoclonal antibodies (mAbs); it now exceeds 100 billion dollars. Due to the complexity of mAb molecular structure and mode of production, mAb manufacturing still represent a significant economic burden to the public health care system. On the one hand, in the biopharmaceutical industry, the lack of cost-effective and high-throughput methods to assess mAb critical quality attributes severely impedes the improvement of current manufacturing processes relying on cell culture. First and foremost, the assessment of mAb glycosylation, a post translational modification performed by the cells, is crucial as glycosylation directly influences mAb stability and therapeutic efficacy. On the other hand, in the clinic, the mode of administration of mAbs also needs improvement to achieve maximal therapeutic efficacy, as it forces the use of huge doses, in turn leading to patient inconvenience and high medical treatment costs. Furthermore, the lack of an efficient and versatile approach to promote the sustained local delivery of mAbs, alone or in combination with other drugs, severely impedes the development and implementation of the next-generation therapeutics. In this presentation, I will focus on the versatile and efficient engineering strategies my team has developed to control mAb quality and delivery by spearheading the use of two distinct peptides, the E and K coils, to design better biosensing assays and control the capture of bioactive mAbs in hydrogels.
Biography
Gregory De Crescenzo is full Professor within the Chemical Engineering department at Polytechnique Montréal. De Crescenzo was CRC-Tier 2 in Protein-enhanced Biomaterials Chairholder (2006-2016). His multidisciplinary training in chemical engineering (INSA Toulouse, France) and biochemistry (McGill University) gives him a particularly broad vision of bioprocess and biomedical engineering. He specializes in analytical technologies
applied to biomanufacturing. Notably, he is an authority on Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR)-biosensing, with international recognition in the development of SPR assays to characterize protein-protein interactions. His research translated in the training of over 25 HQPs in bioprocess engineering holding for most of them key position in industry in Europe and North America (Merck, Astra Zeneca, GSK, among others), within the last ten years. These achievements led to De Crescenzo spearheading a large biomanufacturing initiative, RAMP-UP, to boast research and training while providing adequate infrastructure towards the preparation for the next pandemic. RAMP-UP works in close collaboration with key biopharmaceutical companies based in Quebec. Worth mentioning, De Crescenzo is also director of PrEEmiuM since 2018, a NSERC-funded training program (CREATE), focused on co-training students from pharmaceutical sciences and chemical engineering to optimize their employability in Canada’s biomanufacturing industry. Since 2023, he leads the Biomanufacturing priority axis for the Quebec-based strategic cluster, for research on protein function, engineering, and applications (PROTEO).
Hosted by Dr. Molly Shoichet Snacks and refreshments will be served