Dr. Utku has a long history as both an academic scientist, and entrepreneur, board member and advisor in the biopharmaceutical industry in Europe and North America.
After successfully partnering the therapeutic program of CellAct Pharma, Dr. Utku founded T7 Therapeutics Inc. as a joint venture with TVM Capital to support the development of one of her therapeutic discoveries for autoimmunity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston.
Her background merges many different disciplines, including medicine, immunology, oncology, regulatory affairs and drug development from discovery to clinical application, through to mergers and acquisitions. Dr. Utku trained as a physician at the universities of Münster, Bonn and Pittsburg before embarking on a career in Molecular and Cellular Immunology as a DFG Fellow at Harvard. From there, she was invited to take up a professorship in the Department of medical Immunology at Charité, Berlin. She and her team focus on the characterization of novel human immune receptors to develop specific acting therapeutics both, in academia and the biotechnology industry.