Meet our Scientific Advisors

Prof. Dr. Paolo Arosio is an expert in protein aggregation and biophysical properties of biologicals. Since 2016, he has been a Tenure Track Assistant Professor for Biochemical Engineering at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He received his doctoral degree from ETH Zurich in 2011, and between 2012 and 2016, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, UK.

His special interests are developing innovative technologies for characterizing and understanding protein interactions, self-association, phase separation, and aggregation. His studies have broad implications for both protein aggregation disorders and the development and formulation of biologicals. He is the author of over 90 peer-reviewed articles on the topic and is regularly invited to international conferences on protein engineering. He served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He has been named “Influential Researcher 2018” by the Industrial Engineering Chemical Research ACS. In 2020, Prof. Arosio received the prestigious ERC Consolidator grant on protein phase separation.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Frieß is an expert in protein formulation development, stability and processing, drying technologies including freeze-drying and spray-drying, and drug delivery. He has been a professor of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmaceutics at LMU Munich since 2001.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Frieß has collected more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical technology while working at the University of Erlangen (Germany), Genetics Institute – now Pfizer (Andover, MA, USA), and the University of Illinois (Chicago, IL, USA). Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Frieß is the co-editor of the EJPB (European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics) and has published over 150 research papers, patents and book chapters.

Prof. Dr. Gideon Kersten is a vaccinologist with over 35 years of experience in vaccine development. His special interests are in the characterization and formulation of biologicals. He joined the vaccine division of the Institute for Public Health in the Netherlands in 1985, where he was involved in developing new vaccines and improving existing ones. These included vaccines against polio, influenza, respiratory syncytial (RS) virus, Neisseria meningitidis type B and pertussis. Prof. Kersten was responsible for formulation development and vaccine characterization.

Since 2012, he has held a special professorship in vaccine development at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In 2017, Prof. Kersten became the Chief Scientific Officer of Intravacc, a vaccine R&D institute. In 2020, Prof. Kersten joined Coriolis. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and book chapters and supervised 10 PhD students. He is a frequent lecturer at universities, and during the Corona crisis, journalists frequently contacted him to comment on vaccine-related topics.

Dr. Bruce Kerwin has worked in biotechnology for 30 years and is a recognized protein formulation and drug product development expert. Before joining the Scientific Advisory Board of Coriolis, Dr. Kerwin worked for multiple companies, including Baxter Hemoglobin Therapeutics, Amgen, Just-Evotec Biologics, and Umoja Biopharma. Dr. Kerwin led numerous scientific research and project teams developing novel solutions to formulation problems such as high viscosity, high concentration and protein co-formulation while successfully bringing drug candidates through development from pre-IND to commercialization.

His work on large and small-volume parenterals included recombinant hemoglobin, cytokines, monoclonal antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, PEGylated proteins, glycosylated and non-glycosylated proteins, oncolytic viruses and lentivirus. Dr. Kerwin was also intimately involved with alternative drug delivery systems such as slow-release and nanoparticle formulations. His research has yielded over 60 research publications and book chapters in a wide array of areas relating to protein science and formulation development, including protein stabilization, polysorbate degradation, photodegradation, protein phosphorescence, and high throughput biophysical screening. Dr. Kerwin is an inventor on multiple patents and a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of Pharmaceutical Science.

Prof. Dr. Olivia Merkel is an expert in targeted RNA delivery to treat cancer, inflammatory diseases, and viral infections, focusing on pulmonary administration. She has been a Professor of Drug Delivery in the Department of Pharmacy at LMU Munich in Germany since 2015.

Prof. Dr. Merkel is the president of the Controlled Release Society German Local Chapter and the chair of the CRS Focus Group Transdermal and Mucosal Delivery. The European Research Council, Bavarian Research Foundation, Volkswagen Foundation, Daiichi-Sankyo Europe and AbbVie fund her research. From 2015 until 2017, Prof. Dr. Merkel headed research labs both in Detroit and Munich. From 2011 until 2017, she was an Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutics and an Associate Faculty Member of Oncology at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA, and a Scientific Member of the Molecular Therapeutics Program and Faculty in the Cancer Biology Graduate Program at Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, MI.

Prof. Dr. Merkel received several awards, including the PHOENIX Pharmacy Award, APV Research Award, Princess-Therese of Bavaria Award, an ERC Starting Grant, the Galenus Foundation Technology Award, the Young Investigator Award from the College of Pharmacy at Wayne State, the Young Pharmaceutical Investigator Award granted by the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Science, an invitation to the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, the Carl-Wilhelm-Scheele-Award by the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG) and the award for the best PhD thesis at Philipps-Universität Marburg. Prof. Merkel is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed articles, 15 book chapters and the editor of two books. She served as an NIH reviewer from 2014-2015, is a standing international member of the Swiss National Science Foundation review board, Editorial Board member for the Journal of Controlled Release, the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics, Molecular Pharmaceutics, Advanced NanoBiomed Research, Pharmaceutics, Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B, and an honorary member of the Académie des Alpilles.

Prof. Dr. Reza Nejadnik brings experience and expertise from academic and industrial work in the field of drug product development for biopharmaceuticals. Reza is currently a faculty member of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Iowa.

His research is focused on protein pharmaceuticals, their formulation and characterization, and the interaction of biologics with interfaces. His topics of interest include the delivery, handling and manufacturing processes of protein therapeutics. Reza received his PhD from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 2009. Following a few years of research in the area of proteins, nano and biomaterials at The University of Texas, Northwestern University and Radboud University Nijmegen, Reza joined the Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research to co-lead a European public-private partnership project (COMPACT) that addressed the current challenges with formulation and delivery of macromolecules. In the four years of the COMPACT project, Reza’s research focused on the characterization and understanding of protein aggregation in complex formulations as well as protein-material interactions. Reza then joined Sanofi’s Global Biologic Drug Product Development team and headed a formulation and process development laboratory in the Company’s R&D hub in Frankfurt, Germany. He developed early formulations and drug product manufacturing processes for several molecules in various modalities, including antibodies and nanobodies.

Prof. Dr. Christian Schöneich is the Takeru Higuchi Distinguished Professor for Bioanalytical Chemistry and Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at The University of Kansas. Between 1987 and 1991, he worked in the Department of Radiation Chemistry at the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin, Germany.

He joined the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at The University of Kansas as a post-doctoral fellow in 1991 and as a faculty member in 1992; in 2004, he was a visiting professor at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. His research focuses on oxidation reactions of peptides, proteins, and surfactants. Concerning peptides and proteins, he studies oxidation reactions in vivo and in vitro and their potential consequences for developing stable protein pharmaceuticals, biological aging, and age-related pathologies. He has published over 290 papers on peptide and protein oxidation reactions.

Prof. Dr. Hristo Svilenov is an expert in biotherapeutics’ design, formulation development and analytical characterization. He is Professor of Biopharmaceutical Technology at the Technical University Munich (TUM).

Previously, Prof. Svilenov was an associate professor of biopharmaceutical manufacturing technology and formulation at Ghent University and spent two years as a postdoctoral scientist at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) where he worked at the newly established Centre for Functional Protein Assemblies (CPA). In 2019, he successfully defended his PhD thesis with “summa cum laude” as a Maria Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the group of Prof. Dr. Gerhard Winter. Previously, he worked as a research scientist in a biotech company and as a teaching assistant at the Medical University of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Prof. Dr. Susumu Uchiyama is a biophysical chemist with over 25 years of experience. Since 2017, he has been a professor of biotechnology at the Osaka University in Japan. He focuses on studying solution biophysics of proteins, protein complexes and protein-nucleic acids complexes using various methods, including analytical ultracentrifugation, mass spectrometry (mainly native MS and HDX-MS) and calorimetry. Prof. Uchiyama also remodeled analytical instruments, such as laser optics for the Beckman Model-E analytical ultracentrifuge and digital data acquisition system for the DASM-4 calorimeter. He has also participated in the development of several instrument prototypes.

In 2005, Prof. Uchiyama stayed for one year at Prof. Carol Robinson’s laboratory at Cambridge University, where he focused on native mass spectrometry. He launched U-Medico Inc. in 2006 and has provided analytical services for pharmaceutical companies since 2008. His research interest includes an energetic understanding of immune-related proteins and formulation development of therapeutic proteins and gene therapy products. His research scope also consists of a container closure system for biopharmaceuticals with better quality and more safety. In recent years, Prof. Uchiyama has led a national project in Japan to develop characterization and quality control of virus vectors for gene therapy. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed papers and reviews and edited a book of Analytical Ultracentrifugation from Springer. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards for the Journal of Biochemistry and Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Prof. Wagner is a professor of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) and the Center of Nanoscience in Munich, Germany. Previously (1991-2001), he was the Director Cancer Vaccines & Gene Therapy at Boehringer Ingelheim in Vienna, Austria, where he supervised the first-in-world polymer-based human gene therapy trial in 1994.

Prof. Wagner is an Academician of the European Academy of Sciences, a Controlled Release Society (CRS) College of Fellows member, a German Society for Gene Therapy board member, and the Journal of Gene Medicine Editor-in-Chief. He has authored more than 475 publications with almost 45,000 citations. His current academic research projects focus on the targeted delivery of nucleic acids (including mRNA) and protein therapeutics.

Prof. Dr. Gerhard Winter is an expert in formulation development and the delivery of biopharmaceutical drugs and colloidal drug carriers, parenteral process technologies, and lyophilization. He has been a professor of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmaceutics at LMU Munich since 1999 and was one of the co-founders of Coriolis in 2008.

Besides his long academic career, Prof. Dr. Gerhard Winter has collected more than 12 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry while working for Merck, Boehringer Mannheim and Roche. Amongst many achievements, he was the lead pharmaceutical scientist developing the market formulations for erythropoietin, ibandronate and reteplase. His responsibilities span from preformulation and interface management with protein drug substance development and production to formulation development, stability studies, upscaling and CMC dossier preparation, and technology assessment for drug delivery systems. He also led a large-scale aseptic pilot plant to supply worldwide clinical studies with lyophilizates and sterile solutions. Prof. Dr. Gerhard has published over 230 research papers, patents and book chapters. More than 60 Ph.D. students have finished their thesis under his supervision, most of whom hold positions in the pharma and biotech industry. Since 2006, he has been a co-organizer of the bi-annual conference on freeze drying of pharmaceuticals in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Breckenridge.