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Conference

2nd TCE for Autoimmune Disease Summit

Conference: 2nd TCE for Autoimmune Disease Summit

Date: October 27 - 29, 2026

Location: The Colonnade Hotel, Boston, MA

Certara is proud to support the 2nd T-Cell Engager for Autoimmune Disease Summit, where discovery, translational, preclinical, and clinical leaders are tackling the field’s biggest challenges: reducing CRS toxicities, improving tissue-selective immune depletion, and expanding T-cell engager (TCE) targets beyond B-cells. As autoimmune TCEs move from oncology-inspired concepts into one of the industry’s most closely watched therapeutic modalities, Certara’s quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) expertise offers a mechanistic path through the dosing and translational questions shaping this fast-moving field.

Meet Certara at the Summit

Joshua Apgar, PhD

VP, Head of QSP Software

Dr. Apgar is the VP, Head of QSP Software at Certara, and co-founder of Applied BioMath (acquired by Certara in Dec 2023). Prior to this, Josh was a Principal Scientist in the Systems Biology Group of the Department of Immunology and Inflammation at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. His work leveraged physics-based models to: translate in vitro and in vivo data, assess target feasibility, understand drug mechanism of action, and predict human doses. The ultimate goal of this work was to reduce late stage attrition in drug development through a deep and quantitative interrogation of drug pharmacology and disease pathophysiology.

Josh received his PhD from MIT in Biological Engineering where he worked on experiment design for Systems Biology, focusing on the identification of tractable experiments that could allow for the estimation of unknown parameters and reveal complex mechanisms in signal transduction networks. Before that Josh worked at Avaki to develop a highly scalable software platform to support High Performance Computing, and Enterprise Information Integration in the Life Sciences, and Engineering.

Katie Williams, PhD

Global Portfolio Lead, Modeling & Simulation

Scientific Poster

Bridging Oncology and Autoimmune Disease: Using QSP to Select T-Cell Engager Doses by CRS Risk and Efficacy

This research demonstrates how quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) modeling can leverage existing oncology data to inform T-cell engager (TCE) dose selection for autoimmune diseases, where minimizing cytokine release syndrome (CRS) risk is particularly important. Using a modular QSP model calibrated and validated against published clinical data, researchers simulated 3,030 virtual patients to evaluate efficacy and CRS risk across doses. The findings demonstrate the potential to identify doses that balance therapeutic benefit with safety, while providing a flexible modeling framework that can be adapted to different targets and dosing strategies.

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