Sven Ansorge

Associate Director of Technical Training

CASTL Canada

Sven has more than 15 years of experience in biopharmaceutical industry and R&D. He holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Polytechnique de Montréal and has led teams and projects within academic and industrial/GMP manufacturing environments. He is specialized in bioprocessing for the production of viral vectors, vaccines, recombinant proteins and cell therapy products.
His experience spans from small biotech (Enobia/Alexion, ExCellThera) to large pharma (GSK, Belgium) and from R&D/process development to commercial GMP manufacturing.
Since 2022, he works as Associate Director, Technical Training/Site Manager Montreal at the Canadian Alliance for Skills and Training in Life Sciences (CASTL). CASTL provides world-class technical skills development and training in life sciences specializing in biopharmaceutical manufacturing. It is a unique partnership between academia, industry, and government to address the future skills needs of the fast-growing bioscience sector.
Prior to joining CASTL, he led the manufacturing and process development activities at ExCellThera (2019-2022), a clinical stage cell therapy company and contributed to developing a cell therapy product towards commercial approval.
From 2014-2019, he was at the National Research Council Canada (NRC) where he built and managed a team focusing on scaling-up cell culture-based suspension processes. This included process development and technology transfer of upstream bioprocesses using multiple cell line platforms. One of the focus areas was the development of perfusion-based lentiviral vector production processes, which Sven started to work on in 2006 as a PhD student under Amine Kamen’s supervision. Together with collaborators and colleagues, he has published more than 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has presented at multiple international conferences. Since 2019, he is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at McGill University.