Marcello Maresca

Senior Director

A molecular biologist specialising in genome editing and its applications in drug discovery. He is Senior Director in the Discovery Sciences department within BioPharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca, where he leads the Genome Engineering group developing genome and epigenome editing technologies for drug discovery and for therapeutic genome editing. He earned his doctorate in molecular biology from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, and went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Cambridge, USA, working on genome editing tools for drug discovery. His team engineered the high-fidelity ePsCas9 nuclease derived from Parasutterella secunda, and contributed to methods for measuring in vivo off-target editing in collaboration with research groups at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is co-editor of the Wiley volume Genome Editing in Drug Discovery.