Seshu Tyagarajan,
Ph.D., RAC

Dr. Seshu Tyagarajan serves as Chief Technical and Development Officer at Candel Therapeutics. She brings over two decades of technical, manufacturing and development experience in biologics and cell and gene therapies (CGT). Before joining Candel, Dr. Tyagarajan served as Executive Director and Global Head, Late Stage CMC Strategy for CGT, at Novartis. As a member of the Novartis leadership team, she was responsible for building a CGT pipeline by integrating research, development and manufacturing, and for driving clinical and commercial manufacturing strategy for the CAR-T platform. She successfully led several BLAs/MAAs and INDs and was a key contributor to the groundbreaking BLA submission for Kymriah®, the first ever CAR-T therapy approved by the FDA.

Prior to Novartis, Dr. Tyagarajan held roles of increasing responsibility at Merck, Roche, Biogen Idec (now Biogen), and ImClone a subsidiary of Eli Lilly. Dr. Tyagarajan holds a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from Rutgers University and an M.S. in Bioengineering from Purdue University.