Episode: John Lunger, previously, Chief Patient Supply Officer, Adaptimmune
From nuclear submarine officer to cell therapy pioneer — John Lunger has spent 30 years learning how to get things done when failure is not an option.
In this episode of Behind the Bench, John shares what it really takes to scale complex, patient-centric operations in biotech: the trade-offs nobody tells you about, the governance systems that actually stick, and why leading without deep technical expertise might be the best thing that ever happened to him.
John Lunger is a 30-year life sciences veteran whose career spans three distinct chapters: nuclear submarine officer with the US Navy, operational leader at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (including a stint running a small molecule plant in Dublin), and most recently Chief Patient Supply Officer at Adaptimmune — where he spent eight years scaling one of the most complex supply chains in medicine: autologous T-cell therapy, one patient, one batch at a time.
During his tenure at Adaptimmune, John led the internationalisation of manufacturing operations across the US, Europe, and Canada, built end-to-end CMC capabilities from early clinical to commercial, and helped bring a genuinely novel cell therapy product to market. He has also served in a board capacity with a cell and gene therapy startup, and now consults with late-stage biotech companies where operations and CMC become critical.
He believes you can metric anything.
Behind the Bench is a podcast and webinar series from MyAmici, going inside the world of biotech and life sciences operations. We sit down with the leaders who’ve built, scaled, and survived complex lab and manufacturing environments to share the lessons they learned the hard way — so you don’t have to.
Every episode covers the real decisions, not the polished retrospectives.