Manuel Mohr
Chief Executive Officer D2B3
Manuel Mohr is a biotechnologist with strong hands-on experience working in different pre-clinical biotechnology settings from Europe to the US. He is trained across a number of specialties including gene and cell therapy, CRISPR gene editing, protein and viral vector engineering, and next generation optical microscopy. He has applied this experience to clinical indications such as CNS and PNS neuropathies, ophthalmology, metabolic and auto-immune disorders, musculoskeletal malignancies, and oncology. As a scientist and entrepreneur, it is his goal to drive biomedical innovation to generate safe, effective, and accessible therapeutics and diagnostics for all of humanity.
As director of gene delivery engineering at CellInfinity Bio, Manuel worked on platform development, team and project management and corporate strategy, growing the company from 3 initial employees to a thriving well-funded 15 employee company. At Scribe Therapeutics – a bay area based in vivo CRISPR-gene therapy company – Manuel worked on engineering optimized CRISPR-delivery vectors. Across these early and growth-stage biotech start Manuel contributed to raising capital, monitoring progress and meeting milestones, negotiating collaborations, evaluating platform-disease, as well as acquiring and retaining talent. He advises senior biotech executives in the gene and cell therapy start-up space on strategy, CDMO-contract negotiations, and the strategic formation of alliances.
Manuel holds a PhD in molecular biotechnology from TU Munich in his home country Germany as well as a MSc and a PhD in Bio Systems Science and Engineering from ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He spent several years as a Research Fellow at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus and as Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University and UC Berkeley entering private biotech industry. Manuel has authored well over a dozen high impact publications and is an inventor on almost as many granted and pending patents.
Seminars
- Exploring LNP strategies for CNS delivery, discussing their capacity to encapsulate and protect oligonucleotides, enhance systemic stability, modulate biodistribution, and potentially enable controlled transport across or around the blood–brain barrier
- Advancing peptide-mediated delivery approaches that utilize small targeting or cell-penetrating peptides to facilitate BBB traversal and intracellular uptake, evaluating their modularity, scalability, and potential advantages over antibody-based shuttle platforms
- Evaluating physical BBB modulation techniques, including focused ultrasound and microbubble-assisted disruption, to transiently increase permeability and enable localized brain access, while critically assessing reversibility, safety margins, spatial precision, and translational feasibility
- Realigning current thinking around the need for CNS-selective delivery strategies beyond receptor targeting
- Explore, non-receptor-mediated biologics platform that enables CNS delivery and discover how preclinical rodent and early non-human primate data support its mechanism and safety profile
- Examine how this approach is being applied within D2B3’s pipeline, and ongoing studies to improve CNS delivery