Shane Mierch, PhD
Technical Advisor, Protein Engineering
Dr. Miersch is a protein engineer with over 10 years of experience in techniques for engineering and optimizing antibody function. He obtained his PhD from the University of Windsor and conducted his post-doctoral studies at the Harvard Institute of Proteomics before joining Dr. Sachdev Sidhu at the Toronto Recombinant Antibody Centre. As a Senior Research Associate there, he has led multi-institutional, international efforts with the National Institutes of Health, Jing Medicine, Reflexion Pharmaceuticals, and Washington State University coordinating collaborative efforts aimed at developing antibodies and non-antibody scaffolds for therapeutic applications. His work has focused on engineering and optimizing functional and biophysical properties via the use of degenerate libraries and directed evolution, grafting of protein-protein interaction domains, site-specific modification of proteins and tailored selections on protein homologs and multi-protein complexes. More recently, these efforts have led to the development of novel multivalent and multi-specific antibody formats whose functional properties exceed those of bivalent antibodies. He has authored and co-authored >30 publications in peer reviewed journals including the Journal of Molecular Biology and Cell, is an inventor on 4 patent applications filed and his current interests lie in establishing the broader utility of multi-valent antibodies and developing them for clinical application.