Andy Lewin

Andy Lewin is Chief Business Officer of Ascend GCTX, a new gene and cell therapy manufacturing company pursuing a hybrid model of innovator, program accelerator and manufacturer. Ascend addresses the current manufacturing bottlenecks limiting gene/cell therapy value creation, and partners with ambitious biotechnology teams to embed scalable manufacturing in their operations from the beginning. They support manufacturing and process development projects from design through to clinical and commercial scale, to help deliver next-generation therapies.

Having graduated from Oxford University with a Biochemistry degree, subsequent work on transcriptional control of cellular and viral gene expression led to Andy heading up a lab at AEA Technology, developing novel antisense technologies for target validation in a major collaboration with Pfizer. Transitioning to commercial leadership at AEAT, Andy became Head of Business Development at Cobra Biologics (now Charles River) and at SynCo BioPartners (now Wacker Biochemie), was Co-Founder and Head of Business Development at BioOutsource, a leading biosafety testing company (now part of Sartorius) and VP of Business Development at AGC Biologics before joining Oxford Biomedica in 2018, as VP, Head of Business Development, where he led the threefold growth of Oxford Biomedica’s CDMO business during the period.