Meddy El Alaoui
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer AbTx
Meddy El Alaoui is the CEO of AbTx and the Scientific Director of COVALAB, bringing over eight years of leadership in biotechnology. His career is dedicated to advancing targeted cancer therapies, beginning with his postdoctoral research at the Centre Léon Bérard and the University of Cambridge, where he focused on developing precise immunotherapies for breast cancer to minimize side effects. Previously, he served as a teaching assistant in biochemistry at Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1. Meddy combines deep scientific expertise with a visionary approach to creating more effective and safer therapeutic solutions.
Seminars
- Using peptide-based affinity tags and native transglutaminase to achieve chemoselective, covalent conjugation exclusively at engineered glutamine residues enabling homogeneous, site-specific bioconjugation
- Leveraging innate specificity of enzymatic catalysis for peptide substrates, to drive the conjugation reaction with high fidelity and efficiency, ensuring a homogeneous DAR product with minimal by-products
- Using Therano-Sticktm to conjugate antibody fragments and improve the therapeutic index
As linker innovation rapidly evolves from incremental chemistry optimization to multifunctional control over stability, selectivity, and biodistribution, the field faces a defining challenge: how do we systematically reduce systemic toxicity while preserving potency in increasingly complex tumor environments?
Join leading experts as they exolore how to harmonize conjugation precision, linker stability, and tumor-selective release mechanisms into integrated design frameworks by:
- Reconciling stability with selective activation, examining how charge-shielding, hydrophobicity-masking, and hydrophilic click chemistries can be strategically combined with orthogonal linker architectures to prevent premature systemic cleavage while preserving efficient tumor-site payload release
- Redefining conjugation precision as a determinant of safety, debating the extent to which homogeneous, site-specific enzymatic attachment and controlled DAR distribution can improve pharmacokinetics, reduce off-target toxicity, and enhance the predictability of biomarker-driven efficacy
- Designing linkers to modulate biomarker dependence and bystander effects, evaluating whether next-generation architectures should enforce strict antigen-density reliance or enable controlled payload diffusion to address tumor heterogeneity while maintaining an optimized therapeutic window
