Volker Schellenberger
Amunix Operating Inc., USA
Biography
Volker Schellenberger is President and CEO of Amunix Operating Inc., which he co-founded together with Willem Pim Stemmer in 2006. He initially served as Amunix’ Chief Scientific Officer and is the lead inventor of the company’s XTEN technology. He has over 20 years of industry experience in protein engineering and drug discovery. Prior to co-founding Amunix he served as head of Genencor’s protein engineering department where he invented combinatorial consensus mutagenesis, selection by micro-compartmentalization as well as mutator technology. He focused on the discovery and engineering of antibody-enzyme fusion proteins. Prior to his work on biotherapeutics, he led projects optimizing enzymes for industrial applications as well as microbes for metabolic pathway engineering. He received his PhD from Leipzig University(Germany) in 1986 for studies on protease catalyzed peptide synthesis. After Postdoctoral work at the Institute for Protein Research in Pushchino (Russia) he moved to the University of Göttingen where he developed a novel method for the production of peptides from recombinant peptide-multimers. After a Postdoc with Bill Rutter at the University of California, San Francisco he joined Genencor in 1994. He is author of over 40 scientific papers and inventor of more than 70 issued or pending patent applications. He is a recipient of the Karl Lohmannprize of the German Society of Biochemists.