Leila Mekkaoui

Leila Mekkaoui is the lead vector engineer in the Synthetic Genomics group at Autolus Therapeutics. After training as a molecular biologist (BSc Hons), Leila continued her studies in cancer research (MSc) after which she joined Dr. Martin Pule’s lab at UCL Cancer Institute working on CAR T cell therapy for hematological malignancies. After gaining experience in this field, Leila pursued her Ph.D. in gene therapy focusing on engineering lentiviral vectors to optimise their production, purification, and transduction of target cells. She later joined R&D’s Synthetic Genomics group at Autolus continuing her vector engineering work aimed at releasing some of the bottlenecks imposed by viral vectors and their expression cassettes on the advancement of gene therapy into widespread clinical application