Stemson Appoints Cenk Sumen, PhD, as Chief Technology Officer and Member of Board of Directors
Stemson Therapeutics is pleased to announce Cenk Sumen, PhD, will join our team as Chief Technology Officer. Dr. Sumen will lead Stemson’s manufacturing efforts to prepare for human clinical trials of our hair growth cell therapy and will be responsible for helping drive regulatory and clinical strategy. He will join Stemson’s executive team, reporting to Geoff Hamilton, Chief Executive Officer of Stemson, and will serve on the company Board of Directors.
“Cenk brings almost a decade of experience translating early stage cell therapy candidates into GMP compliant manufacturing environments. He joins our team at an exciting time where we can incorporate considerations for manufacturing scale and compliance into our final therapy design and protocols,” said Geoff Hamilton, Chief Executive Officer of Stemson Therapeutics. “Cenk’s leadership and demonstrated track record in cell therapy manufacturing are a critical addition to our capabilities.”
“I am thrilled to join Stemson as we work to bring a novel and revolutionary cell therapy for hair growth to market,” said Dr. Sumen. “Achieving scalable manufacturing is a key challenge for all cell therapy companies as they take their product into clinical trial. I look forward to working with the executive team and our collaborators in delivering a robust manufacturing environment designed to deliver the scale, safety and quality our patients and clinicians will demand.”
Dr. Sumen brings over a decade in the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries. He was most recently Director of Business Development for the BioProduction Division at ThermoFisher Scientific. In this role, he held global responsibility for identifying novel technologies for biopharmaceutical manufacturing and forming technology co-development partnerships. Prior to ThermoFisher, Dr. Sumen led technical and business development at PCT, a leading cell therapy CDMO which is now Hitachi Chemical Advanced Cell Therapeutics Solutions. He has also held roles at STEMCELL Technologies, Perkin Elmer and Life Technologies. Prior to those roles, he was an HHMI and Cancer Research Institute fellow studying checkpoint blockade in cancer immunotherapy at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center with Nobel Laureate James P. Allison. Dr. Sumen earned his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Stanford University and completed postdoctoral studies in intravital imaging of immune cells at Harvard Medical School.