Dr. Katharina Billian-Frey has strong expertise in antibody-based immune-oncology drugs and protein engineering. She is a co-founder of TriCos Biotherapeutics and has the role of Scientific Director R&D. In her previous position at Apogenix, she headed the Protein Engineering Group within the Drug Discovery Department. Her main focus at Apogenix was the development of biotherapeutic agonistic drugs targeting the TNF receptor superfamily, especially of bispecific formats.   

Prior to Apogenix, she worked at HI-STEM, a spin-off company of the German Cancer Research Center. She was responsible for the development of an antibody drug discovery pipeline for cancer stem cell derived targets, including recombinant antigen expression and phage display-based selection of drug candidate antibodies.

Katharina Billian-Frey received her PhD from the ETH Zurich on antibody-based immunocytokines for targeting the tumor vasculature. She holds a diploma in Technical Biology from the University of Stuttgart with a focus on antibody fusion proteins