A Masters in Microbiology from Nagarjuna University, India, Tej Kumar M (Tej) has 19+ years of experience in the development of recombinant therapeutic proteins, monoclonal antibodies, and screening for novel antigen molecules. He has a deep understanding and experience in the product life cycle of biosimilar molecules, and has successfully led specific phases of biosimilar product development, which are currently in the advanced stages of regulatory approvals. One of them was granted market authorization in 2022, by EMA. Prior to Lextro, he worked in leading biopharma companies such as Reliance Life Sciences, Inbioprosolutions, Stelis Biopharma and Shantha Biotechnics.

Tej has worked extensively in expression studies of therapeutic proteins in E. coli and CHO cell line expression systems at shake flask level, Batch and Fed-batch processes for optimizing growth and expression of therapeutic proteins in E. coli expression system at 5 and 10 litre fermenter scales.

One of his discoveries was the Identification of an eukaryotic ribosomal protein in SCC-4 expression library which is reactive to the patient’s sera, and not previously reported in oral cancer cell lines. His special interest lies in gene editing technologies such as CRISPR cas9, etc.