Expand your T cell manufacturing capacities in an automated, closed system to shorten your production time

Sophia Lollies is a Global Product Manager for the clinical engineered cells portfolio at Miltenyi Biotec. Since 2021 she has been working with the R&D and Clinical Development teams to advance the development of CAR and TCR T cell therapy enabling tools, with a particular focus on CAR T cell immunotherapy. Prior to this, Sophia supported the development of clinical applications on the CliniMACS^® Prodigy for industrial customers. Additionally, she gained relevant experience from Bayer AG in the field of Global Screening and Automation, following the completion of her MSc in Life and Medical Sciences at the LIMES Institute in Bonn, Germany.

Dr Johnston is responsible for the development of cutting-edge technologies to enable cell and gene therapies to be applied routinely in the clinic. Since joining Miltenyi Biotec in 1999, Dr Johnston has developed a number of reagents and procedures to improve the efficiency of genetic modification of primary cells such as human T and stem cells. A number of these procedures have been fully automated on a functionally closed cell processing platform – the CliniMACS^® Prodigy Platform. In addition, Dr Johnston has led the development of numerous products for magnetic isolation of cells, molecules, organelles, and for use in the field of HIV research. He has been Principle Investigator on a number of European consortium grants focused on the genetic modification of stem cells, most recently Cell-PID and SCIDNET. His group is also investigating new targets for Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CAR) to be used in T cell cancer immunotherapies.

Prior to joining Miltenyi Biotec, he studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, where he also completed a PhD studying immunopathological mechanisms in the CNS. This was followed by postdoctoral research at Würzburg University with Prof Volker ter Meulen, working with recombinant measles virus systems, and supported by two fellowships from the Wellcome Trust and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.