Catherine Colandro

Catherine joined Dark Horse Consulting in 2020, bringing 4 years of prior experience in process development of cell and gene-modified cell therapy products, with a past focus of optimizing late-stage cell therapy processes for commercial readiness and launch.

Catherine’s career started at Biogen in research triangle park (RTP), where she was involved in the transfer and monitoring of new molecules from clinical to commercial stages. At Biogen she developed technical knowledge of upstream laboratory operations for several monoclonal antibody therapies. She supported molecules at the RTP site by conducting process monitoring and laboratory experiments to assess process robustness and optimization.

Catherine then joined Juno Therapeutics in 2016 in Seattle as a process engineer. It was there she was able to make large scale process changes to the clinical CAR-T cell manufacturing processes. Her main focus was to optimize the cell therapy processes in order to increase operational efficiency to ensure successful delivery of the life-saving therapies to patients. She designed and executed multi-donor studies to support the processes changes and aided cGMP implementation and regulatory filings. One of her areas of expertise is on T cell media and buffer preparations and the automation and scale up of these activities. She has also assessed and implemented customized single use solutions for several unit operations of the cell therapy processes. During her time at Juno she led root cause analyses, risk assessments, data analyses and authoring of technical reports to support process changes and investigations.

Dark Horse Consulting Group
Consultant

Juno Therapeutics/BMS
Process Engineer I-III, Global Manufacturing Sciences and Technologies

Biogen
Associate Scientist, Manufacturing Sciences

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
‍B.S. Biological Systems Engineering with a concentration in Bioprocessing