Kathrin Schumann

Prof. Dr. Kathrin Schumann is an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), leading the 'Engineering Immune Cells for Therapy' group within the TUM School of Medicine and Health. Her research focuses on CRISPR-based engineering of human immune cells to develop novel therapies for autoimmune and tumor diseases. She holds a doctorate from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and has conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco, under Professors Alex Marson and Jeffrey Bluestone.

Dr. Schumann’s academic career includes a Presidential Postdoc Fellowship at Novartis (Basel) and a tenure-track appointment at TUM since 2018. Her work emphasizes genomic editing of T cells to study gene function and improve cell therapy safety. Key research themes include CRISPR-mediated gene silencing, T cell receptor engineering, and HIV-host interaction studies.

• Education:
  • Bachelor/Master in Biochemistry, University of Tübingen
  • PhD, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (Martinsried)
  • Postdoc, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

Her research has yielded breakthroughs in CRISPR applications for T cell therapy, including PD-1 disruption to enhance anti-tumor efficacy and targeted editing of T cell receptors. Awards include a DFG research grant (2016).

Notable achievements include the development of CRISPR ribonucleoprotein platforms for primary T cells and insights into metabolic checkpoints in T cell exhaustion. Her lab collaborates globally to translate CRISPR-based discoveries into clinical therapies.