Christian Marsolais
Senior Vice President & Chief Medical Officer Theratechnologies
Christian Marsolais, PhD, is Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Theratechnologies Inc., where he leads global medical and clinical strategy. He has over nineteen years at the company, previously serving as Vice President of Clinical Research and Medical Affairs. Dr. Marsolais holds a PhD in Biochemistry from Université de Montréal. His expertise spans drug development, clinical trials, and regulatory strategy, supporting innovation in specialty therapeutics. He is recognized for advancing patient-focused research and fostering collaboration across scientific and commercial teams. He contributes to industry discussions on biopharmaceutical innovation and has guided programs from early development to commercialization successfully.
Seminars
As the ADC field rapidly expands beyond the established topoisomerase-I paradigm into dual-payload constructs, bispecific formats, and entirely novel toxin classes, the safety assessment playbook must evolve. With no historical safety data to rely on and toxicity mechanisms that may be fundamentally different from traditional ADCs, developers face an urgent need to establish new frameworks for predicting and mitigating risk.
Join preclinical safety leaders from biotech and large pharma as they share strategies for de-risking the next generation of ADC innovation by:
- Designing fit-for-purpose toxicology packages for dual-payload ADCs, debating whether standard NHP studies are sufficient to detect additive or synergistic toxicities, and exploring how staggered-dosing studies and payload-selective biomarkers can deconvolute the contribution of each warhead to the overall safety profile
- Assessing the unique liabilities of bispecific and biparatopic formats, discussing how altered binding avidity, internalization kinetics, and tissue distribution create novel safety challenges that require bespoke in vitro and in vivo models to accurately predict clinical risk
- Prioritizing novel payload classes by mechanistic profiling, evaluating how a standardized preclinical safety screening cascade, encompassing human primary cell panels, tissue organoids, and computational modelling, can rapidly identify the most promising payloads with differentiated toxicity profiles before committing to costly IND-enabling studies
- Leveraging a novel receptor-driven internalization mechanism to enable rapid, tumor-specific payload delivery, reducing systemic exposure and off-target toxicity compared to traditional ADCs
- Utilizing PDC architecture to achieve differentiated pharmacokinetics and improved safety profiles, addressing challenges associated with dual payloads and complex ADC formats
- Activating multimodal mechanisms of action to enhance efficacy while enabling safer combination strategies
