Jinpian Diao-Piezunka

Head of Technical Development, Spark Therapeutics

Jinpian is an Engineer who loves developing new technologies to make medicines. She studied Chemical Engineering at school with a focus on biochemical engineering. While doing her PhD, she developed a miniaturized bioreactor that can be used for highly parallel animal cell cultures. After getting her PhD, Jinpian has worked on developing and scaling-up the manufacturing processes of more than a dozen of biologics. She played a major role in the process development and global filing of Opdivo® and Sarclisa®.

Over her 17 years of working on developing industrial manufacturing processes for medicines, she has taken on increasing responsibilities of leading teams of downstream development, integrated CMC project management, upstream development, end-to-end process development, and technical transfer, production support, and data analytics across global manufacturing networks at Genentech, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Sanofi. She joined Spark Therapeutics in 2021 as Spark’s technical development head. In this role, she is helping advance gene therapy manufacturing technologies to deliver gene therapies to many more patients at lower cost.

Jinpian received her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Tsinghua University. She then obtained her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University. She also has an EMBA degree from INSEAD in France.