Ramya Tunuguntla | Director Process Development and Manufacturing
Stanford University

I am the Director of Process Development and Manufacturing at Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy (CCT) in the Laboratory of Cell and Gene Medicine.  Trained as a Bioengineer, I have spent the last 8-10 years designing materials-based solutions from developing nanofluidic devices to, most recently, novel cell therapy platforms for cancer therapeutics.  Previously, in the cancer cell therapy space, I designed a nanoparticle library screening approach for isolating patient-specific neoepitopes for patients with low tumor mutation burden, optimized a non-viral CRISPR electroporation platform for clinical implementation of an autologous TCR therapy, and translated this and other research into investigator-initiated Phase I trials.  This research work has led to extensive experience in developing large scale cell therapy processes to create effective GMP methods optimized for robust clinical responses, and in identifying biomarkers associated with clinical outcomes.  Currently, at CCT I am continuing this effort for several CAR-T based therapy programs at our CDMOs and academic GMP facilities.