Franziska Mortensen is working as Associate Director in a biotech company (Merus NV). She gets a lot of energy from her job and is happy to have taken this path. It all started in Germany where she studied ‘Applied Natural Sciences’. Her curiosity pushed her to continue with research for a while and she ultimately received her PhD in protein biochemistry in 2015. She moved to the Netherlands for a Postdoc position and realized after a while that she wants to continue with research and development outside of academia. After some tough months of applications and interviews she found the position that was made for her. Her work as Associate Director demands a lot of flexibility and growth, and that makes it such an exciting career path.

Merus NV (Merus) is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing multispecific antibodies referred to as Multiclonics® to address unmet needs of patients with various types of cancer. The therapeutic candidates are designed to engage cancer antigens and harness the power of the immune system to kill tumor cells in unique and powerful ways. The clinical pipeline is composed of several bispecific antibody candidates, with several other candidates in pre-clinical development. Merus has been a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq since 2016. Merus’ headquarters are located in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with a subsidiary, Merus US Inc. located in Cambridge (MA) in the USA and collaborators, licensees and clinical trial sites located around the world.

Kite is a biopharmaceutical company engaged in the development of innovative cancer immunotherapies with a goal of providing rapid, long-term durable response and eliminating the burden of chronic care. The company is focused on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) and T cell receptor (TCR) engineered cell therapies designed to empower the immune system's ability to recognize and kill tumours.