Christoph Erkel
Vice President Research & Development VERAXA Biotech
As VP R&D, Dr. Erkel oversees all R&D activities at VERAXA. In his 20 years of industry experience, he has gained in-depth knowledge in antibody design, antibody discovery/phage display, antibody engineering, lead candidate optimization, and development of IgGs, bispecific antibodies, multivalent formats as well as T cell engagers. Before joining VERAXA in 2023, he held several positions of increasing responsibility in R&D at MorphoSys AG. He received his PhD from the Philipps-University of Marburg, completed a postdoctoral position at the Max-Planck-Institute in Marburg, and began his professional career at Sloning Biotechnology in the field of synthetic biology.
Seminars
Thursday 10th December 2026
Panel Discussion: Navigating Preclinical, Translational & Clinical Bottlenecks by Evaluating Key Learnings to Accelerate TCEs Towards Approval
3:30 pm
- How to improve preclinical models to better predict activity, clinical safety and de-risk translation into the clinic?
- How are next-generation preclinical platforms (e.g. organoids, humanised models, ex vivo systems) enabling evaluation of conditional activation and masking strategies?
- How can translational biomarker strategies, including antigen density thresholds and T-cell fitness profiling, improve patient stratification and clinical signal prediction?
- What will regulators most want to see before they are comfortable with first-in-human studies in these settings?
Thursday 10th December 2026
Conditionally Active, Dual-Targeting BiTAC-TCEs for the Treatment of Solid Tumours
2:00 pm
- Our BiTAC-TCE platform is designed to overcome the on-target, off-tumour toxicities of conventional (mono-targeting) TCEs
- AND-gated targeting of antigen pairs together with an on-cell assembly of a split anti-CD3 increases the selectivity to dual antigen-positive tumour cells
- In vitro and in vivo data of several programs including our most advanced preclinicalstage* EpCAM-targeting BiTAC-TCE will be presented
