Manuel Pinto

Background

About Manuel Pinto

I have 7.5 years of industry research experience at Adaptimmune Limited, an industry leader in developing TCR-based gene and cell therapies to treat cancer. In April 2023, I have joined Avacta Life Sciences as Principal Scientist in the Protein Team of the Therapeutics Division, working on the Affimer biotherapeutics platform.As a Principal Scientist at Adaptimmune, I was responsible for leading the screening, functional characterisation, and specificity profiling of TCR candidates for pre-engineering lead candidate selection. I was also involved in the strategy planning and coordination of the wider TCR discovery pipeline activities. As part of my role, I also provided scientific leadership and mentorship to a small team of scientists, I worked in different project teams in a matrix environment and collaborated with several functions.At Adaptimmune, I also contributed to the identification and affinity enhancement of tumour targeting TCRs for different pipeline programs, including the one leading to the clinical afami-cel TCR (ADP-A2M4). I have also been involved in developing internal platforms, including leading the development of a mammalian-display antigen screening platform, where I worked closely with the Preclinical team.Prior to moving into industry and the immunotherapy field, I did a postdoc at IBMC, University of Porto, Portugal, where I studied protein modification by ubiquitin and SUMO (small ubiquitin-like modifier), particularly focusing on the proteases that reverse these modifications. During this period, I was also principal investigator of a research project and supervised the work of a Master researcher.I have a degree in Biochemistry and a PhD, where I studied the mechanisms of peroxisome biogenesis, both from the University of Porto, Portugal.During my career, I developed technical expertise ranging from Molecular Biology and Protein Biochemistry to Cell Biology, as listed below.Molecular Biology: PCR, molecular cloning, library building, DNA sequencing analysis (Sanger & NGS).Cell Biology: cell culture (primary cells and tumour lines), transfection, lentivirus production & transduction, cell engineering, cell-based assays, flow cytometry, mammalian display.Protein Biochemistry: E. coli expression, protein purification, FPLC, protein refolding, SPR (Biacore), protein modification, pull-down assays, immunoprecipitation, in vitro assays, SDS-PAGE, Western blotting.