Ertan Eryilmaz
Vice President, Biologics InduPro
Ertan Eryilmaz is the Vice President of Biologics at InduPro, where he manages the Molecular Discovery Engineering and Protein Sciences teams. He plays a key role in strategic planning and provides scientific leadership throughout the organization. Ertan is known for his expertise in therapeutic biologics research and development, particularly in antibody discovery, protein engineering, and progressing biologics from target identification to IND. Before joining InduPro, Ertan was the VP of Biologics at Xilio Therapeutics. He led the Biologics Department, where he developed and executed discovery strategies for new biologics-based therapies and advanced them towards IND enablement. Earlier in his career, Ertan held important roles at Takeda Oncology, managed antibody discovery campaigns, led technology development projects, and helped build a strong early discovery pipeline in immuno-oncology. He also led and served in biologics and cell therapy discovery project teams. Before Takeda, he led the Biotherapeutics Engineering team at Agensys, a subsidiary of Astellas Pharma. His team discovered enfortumab, which became the FDA-approved PADCEV, a nectin-4 ADC. Prior to Agensys – at Boehringer Ingelheim, Ertan worked on developing proprietary bispecific antibody formats, with several molecules now in various clinical phases. Ertan earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and his Ph.D. in physics from the City University of New York. He held post-doctoral positions at Weill Cornell Medical College and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Ertan has numerous publications and patents, including contributions to the development of bispecific and multifunctional biologics.
Seminars
Late-stage failures driven by aggregation, instability, and manufacturability issues continue to impact biologics pipelines, often because developability is overlooked during early design. As organizations aim to reduce downstream re-engineering, this workshop will explore how to embed developability and CMC considerations earlier through better data strategies, integrated screening, and stronger alignment between discovery and CMC teams to select candidates that are both functional and scalable.
This workshop will focus on:
- How to identify developability risks such as aggregation, viscosity, instability and, poor expression earlier in design workflows using physicochemical and biophysical indicators
- How to integrate developability screening with sequence design and candidate selection to prioritize molecules that are stable at high concentration and suitable for manufacture
- How to improve data quality for developability prediction, including use of representative formulation conditions and more consistent screening assays
- How to embed manufacturability considerations, such as expression purification and, formulation constraints earlier to reduce downstream re-engineering
- How to improve alignment between discovery and CMC teams to enable better decision making and smoother progression from design to development
- Combining computational analysis with experimental interrogation to uncover biologically relevant protein relationships and guide therapeutic hypotheses
- Using rapid probe generation and high-throughput testing to inform target selection, molecular design, and functional optimization
- Applying iterative design-build-test workflows to translate biological insights into differentiated therapeutic concepts
