Laurent Ducry, Ph.D (born 1971) studied chemistry at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and did his diploma thesis with Prof. T. Gallagher at the University of Bristol (UK). He obtained his Ph.D. from the ETH Zürich (Switzerland) with Prof. F. Diederich in 1998. He then held a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia with Prof. A. B. Smith, III and Prof. R. Hirschmann.
Ducry began his industrial carrier in process R&D at Lonza in Visp (Switzerland) in 2000. His activities focused on the development and scale-up of chemical processes, as well as the production of pharmaceutical intermediates and APIs under cGMP. He became Group Leader of the antibody-drug conjugates process development team in 2008 and Head of Bioconjugates at Lonza in 2016.
He joined Kodiak Sciences in 2019 as head of Biologics Development and Manufacturing, responsible for the global supply chain of Kodiak’s bioconjugates (DS and DP). Kodiak is a clinical stage company developing innovative therapeutics to treat chronic, high prevalence ophthalmic diseases. The key novelty in Kodiak’s approach is the use of a custom phosphorylcholine biopolymer that, after coupling to antibodies, leads to a bioconjugate with the potential for higher efficacy and significantly longer duration in the eye.
He is the editor of “Antibody-Drug Conjugates: Methods and Protocols” (Springer, Humana Press, 2013).
