Dennis Plenker

Dennis Plenker is a senior staff scientist at xilis. Dennis previously worked as a senior scientist at Loxo Oncology at Lilly from September 2021 to June 2022, where they were responsible for target validation, assay optimization, small and large molecule screens, and functional readouts.

From October 2017 to September 2021, Dennis was an research investigator and technical manager at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Organoid Facility. In this role, they were a functional and translational cancer geneticist focused on patient-derived organoids of pancreatic cancer to understand how to more effectively treat patients. Their accomplishments include the identification of novel targets for patient-specific therapies beyond standard-of-care chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, leading the PASS-01 clinical trial (NCT04469556) organoid generation and drug screen to compare clinical and in vitro drug responses, developing organoid reagents enabling more robust and faster organoid growth and recovery, and generating 100 organoids of different origin for the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Model Development Center.

Dennis Plenker earned their Doktor (Ph.D.) in genetics from the University of Cologne and their Diplom in molekulare biomedizin from The University of Bonn.