V. Mitch Luna

V. Mitch Luna has a long and varied work experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. In 2021, they began working as an Associate Director at Appia Bio. Prior to this, they worked at Amgen from 2014-2021 as a Scientist/Senior Scientist, where they engineered bi-specific therapeutics with modulated functionality for inflammation and oncology targets. V. Mitch also had experience in display technologies and in silico approaches as applied to protein engineering programs. From 2011-2014, they worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where they determined the structure of Uba6, an E1 enzyme in the ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS). V. Mitch also designed, expressed, and purified new constructs of target proteins for crystallization. From 2004-2011, they worked as a PhD Candidate at The Scripps Research Institute, where they identified and characterized the oxygen pathways in cytochrome ba3 oxidase (ba3), a membrane protein crucial in cellular respiration. V. Mitch also designed a novel method to obtain kinetic “snapshots” of oxygen diffusion in ba3. Finally, in 2003, they worked as a Research Intern at XenoPort, where they developed and optimized transporter assays in numerous systems to screen for active transport of drugs.

V. Mitch Luna received their BS in Biology from Stanford University between 2001 and 2004. V. Mitch then went on to earn a PhD in Biology (X-ray crystallography) from Scripps Research between 2004 and 2011.