Tim Fugmann | CSO and Co-founder
Alithea Bio

Dr. Tim Fugmann is CSO and Co-Founder of Alithea Bio, a biotechnology company specializing in immunopeptidomics, HLA peptide mapping, and precision immunotherapy. He is an expert in mapping HLA-presented peptides using mass spectrometry and bioinformatics and has spent more than a decade advancing translational immunotherapy, precision medicine, and target discovery. Dr. Fugmann studied Technical Biology at the University of Stuttgart and earned his PhD from ETH Zurich, where he developed proteomics methodologies for the discovery of disease-relevant biomarkers and therapeutic targets in cancer and kidney disease. Following his PhD, he joined Philochem AG, the discovery unit of the Philogen group, where he led target and biomarker discovery programs for nearly a decade. During this time, his team implemented state-of-the-art HLA peptidomics technologies to study T cell–cancer cell interactions and support the development of next-generation immunotherapies. He later joined the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine to help translate TCR-engineered T cell therapies from academic research into clinical applications before being appointed Professor for mass spectrometry-based proteomics at Justus Liebig University Giessen in 2021. Dr. Fugmann co-founded Alithea Bio in 2019 to advance clinical applications of immunopeptidomics and AI-driven precision immunotherapy. Alithea partners with biotech, pharmaceutical, and academic organizations worldwide to support TCR and TCR-mimic therapeutics, cancer vaccine development, target validation, immunogenicity assessment, and off-target toxicity prediction. The company combines large-scale mass spectrometry and bioinformatics capabilities with proprietary healthy and tumor tissue datasets to identify and validate clinically relevant HLA-presented peptides. Under his scientific leadership, Alithea developed HLA-Compass, a proprietary immunopeptidomics database containing thousands of healthy and disease tissue samples and more than one million unique HLA peptides. The platform enables rapid evaluation of canonical and non-canonical antigen targets, including splice variants, endogenous retroviruses, repetitive elements, and dark antigens, supporting neoepitope prioritization, antigen presentation optimization, and safety assessment for next-generation immunotherapies.