Marit van Buuren

Marit van Buuren is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Third Rock Ventures, where she discovers and builds new approaches centered on T cell modulation in solid tumors. Throughout her career as a scientist-entrepreneur, she has focused on turning mechanistic insight into products that reach the clinic.

Before joining Third Rock, Marit was Senior Director at BioNTech US. There she led a multidisciplinary team spanning T cell immunology, process development, and gene editing, and was program lead for BNT221, a personalized neoantigen-specific T cell therapy that she advanced from initial concept through a Phase 1 clinical trial in Europe. Earlier in her career, she was a founding employee at Neon Therapeutics, where she built the company’s T cell therapy capabilities from the ground up and was a key contributor to the strategic pivot into cell therapy that led to its acquisition by BioNTech.

Marit earned her Ph.D. in Immunology in the Schumacher Lab at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. She has published her research on neoantigen biology and T cell therapy in Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Medicine, and Nature Communications.

Drawn to people as much as to science, Marit cares about building strong relationships that turn good ideas into real impact, both inside and outside work. She does her best thinking in the woods and on the trails, and her favorite time outdoors is spent with her family.