Meet the Experts Transporter Conference Budapest 2018

BARTHMES Maria, PhD

Biography

Maria Barthmes, PhD, is an electrophysiologist and engineer specialized on membrane transporters. As scientist and product manager she is focusing on technical and application development of SSM-based measuring systems for transporters at Nanion Technologies in Munich.

After her master’s degree on biotechnical engineering at the Munich University of Applied Sciences she obtained her PhD in Pharmacology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. During this time she developed new measurement procedures to investigate prokaryotic and mitochondrial ion transport systems, in particular BK_ca and NCX.

FANG Zhizhou, PhD

Biography

Dr. Zhizhou Fang has a broad background in different scientific areas. Originally a chemist by training with an emphasis on inorganic chemistry and chemical engineering, he has received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology, where he has specialized in protein biochemistry, assay development and medicinal chemistry in the kinase field. His patent on the iFLiK technology describes how environment-sensitive fluorophores can be used to detect conformational changes associated with ligand binding. He is currently the head of the transporter lab at AbbVie in Germany, where his team supports projects in the early discovery phase to optimize lead candidates, as well as late development projects in the clinical stage. His current focus is on brain penetration, transporter kinetics and modeling.

KRAJCSI Péter, PhD

Biography

Dr. Peter Krajcsi has extensive experience in biotechnology. He received his PhD in biochemistry from University of Szeged and later a Doctor of Sciences degree in biological sciences from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In his academic career he has focused on three major topics (i) steroid receptors (ii) molecular biology of adenoviruses and (iii) apoptosis. For the past 13 years he has been working in R&D management positions for small and medium size enterprises in drug research and gene therapy in Hungary as well as in the United States. Since 2002 he is the Chief Scientific Officer of Solvo Biotechnology. At Solvo the focus is on membrane transporters and utilization of membrane transporter technology in drug discovery and development as well as in development of diagnostics tools for cancer and inflammatory diseases.

KRISHNA Sanjeev, FRCP, ScD, FMedSci

Biography

Sanjeev Krishna has developed new diagnostic approaches for infections and increased understanding of their pathophysiology as well as improving treatment modalities. His research has focused on infectious disease, particularly malaria, with a special interest in transporter proteins – the targets of existing antimalarial drugs as well as potential new drug targets. His wide-ranging research has spanned clinical trials of antimalarial treatments, mechanisms of drug resistance, and identification of the likely target of the current first-line antimalarial treatment, artemisinin. He has also identified transporter proteins as valid targets for new drug development. His research has fed into international guidelines on malaria treatment and global surveys of antimalarial resistance. He also has a strong interest in diagnostics, and, in developing an affordable point-of-care diagnostic device for drug resistance as well as identifying infections. More recently he is studying how to repurpose artemisinins (the discovery of which one this years Nobel Prize in Medicine) as cheap, safe, effective and affordable treatments for cancers.

LORYAN Irena, PhD

Biography

Irena Loryan, M.D., Ph.D. is a researcher in the Translational Pharmacokinetics-Pharmacodynamics, tPKPD Group at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, Uppsala University. She has more than 10 years of experience in the field of pharmacokinetics.

Her current research interest focuses on mechanistic understanding of CNS drug disposition in health and disease with specific focus on discrete brain regions, aiming to advance pharmacotherapy and to support CNS drug development. She received her M.D. from Yerevan State Medical University in 2001 and earned Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Biochemistry in 2007. In the period from 2008 to 2010, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Pharmacogenetics in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, Karolinska Institutet (Prof. Magnus Ingelman-Sundberg Lab). From 2010 to 2013, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the tPKPD Group (Prof. Margareta Hammarlund-Udenaes Lab) in collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceutical.

MASEREEUW, Rosalinde, PhD

Biography

Roos Masereeuw (UU) received her PhD from Radboud University in Nijmegen in January 1997. This PhD program and a postdoc period were partly performed at National Institute for Environmental Sciences (NIEHS/NIH), Research Triangle Park, NC, USA. Dr. Masereeuw also visited the NIEHS/NIH institute Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (ME, USA) as principal investigator in 1997, 1998, 2010 and 2014. In November 1996, she joined the Dept. of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Radboudumc as assistant professor and in July 2002, she was appointed as associate professor after obtaining an NWO-ASPASIA award. In 2009, she received the Dutch Pharmacological Society (NVF) Schering-Plough Pharmacology Award, in 2010 the Prix Galien Research Award and in 2015 she was elected Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. Since July 2015 she is full professor of Experimental Pharmacology and since November 2018 director of research at Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences in The Netherlands. Research in the Masereeuw group is focused on developing novel therapeutic strategies to improve organ function in chronic disorders. Her group has developed unique human renal cell lines with a high predictive value for drug transport and metabolism. These cell lines are being used in the development of a bioartificial kidney, organotypic cultures for in vitro toxicity testing of chemical entities and drugs in development, and for studying the renal tubular secretion and reabsorption machinery. Roos Masereeuw has (co-)authored over 190 scientific papers, successfully supervised 20 PhD students and currently supervises 12 PhD students and 5 post-docs.

OSWALD Stephan, PhD

Biography

Dr. Oswald received his master in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Humboldt University Berlin, Germany in 2001. After that he worked in the pharmaceutical industry and pharmacies for two years. From 2004-2007 he completed his PhD thesis at the Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Greifswald, Germany. In 2007 he also finished his advanced training in pharmaceutical analytics and became the head of the GLP-certified analytical laboratory of his department. During his time as postdoctoral fellow in Greifswald, he was from 07/2007 – 06/2012 the head of the research project entitled “Drug transport-based concepts and drug-delivery-technologies for optimizing the clinical application of drugs” funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

From 01/2012 – 06/2012 he was a visiting scholar at Pfizer Inc., Global Research and Development, Pharmacokinetics and Drug Metabolism in Groton, CT, USA and at the University of Washington, Department of Pharmaceutics (Prof. Jashvant Unadkat) in Seattle, WA, USA. In 11/2012 he was appointed as assistant professor of “Clinical Pharmacology of Transporter Proteins” at the Department of Clinical Pharmacology and became the head of the BMBF funded research project „Compartmental Drug Absorption and Transport (COM_DAT): Pharmacokinetic Concepts to an individualized Therapy” which aimed to optimize the drug therapy and safety by generating predictive in vitro- and in vivo models to estimate or even predict the drug exposure or drug-drug interactions in humans. From 04/2015 – 02/2018 he was the head of the Department of Clinical Pharmacology of the University Medicine Greifswald, Germany at the Center of Drug Absorption and Transport (C_DAT). Since 04/2020 he is working as a full professor of pharmacology at the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology of the University Medicine Rostock. 

His research interests are focused on the expression, regulation and function of transporter proteins and metabolizing enzymes in the human intestine and their impact on oral drug absorption, inter-subject variability in efficacy and side effects of drugs as well as drug-drug interactions. He worked for over 16 years in the field of Clinical Pharmacology and author of about 80 papers in peer-review journals. His methodical expertise is the field of bioanalytics (small molecules and mass-spectrometry-based targeted proteomics), pharmacokinetics and in vitro models of transporter function.

POLLER Birk, PhD

Biography

Dr. Poller has been employed at Novartis since 2010 as a laboratory head for in vitro drug transporter studies. Dr. Poller is interested in the interplay between transport and metabolic processes in the areas of clearance IVIVE, drug-drug interaction assessments and drug classification systems such as the EC3S. He contributed to the establishment of novel methods for hepatic and renal IVIVE as well as for intracellular concentration-based risk assessments of drug-induced cholestasis. In addition Dr. Poller acts as DMPK expert in cross-functional project teams during (pre-)clinical development and is familiar with PBPK modeling software for clinical DDI simulations. Dr. Poller received his Ph.D from the University of Basel, Switzerland focusing on cellular blood-brain barrier models. He continued his research on efflux transporter interplay at the blood-brain barrier as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Dr. Alfred Schinkel at the Netherland Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. Dr. Poller’s academic and industrial research projects resulted in 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts and he gave presentations at several scientific meetings. 

REBOUL Emmanuelle, PhD

Biography

Dr. Emmanuelle Reboul received an Engineer diploma in Nutrition and Food Sciences from AgroSup Dijon, France in 2002. During her PhD at the INSERM laboratory Human Nutrition and Lipids in Marseille, she studied carotenoid, vitamin A and E intestinal absorption. She then joined the working group of Dr. R.S. Molday in 2006 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada to work on ATP transporter molecular functioning. 

She returned to Marseille, France at the end of 2008 to join the Nutrition, Obesity, and Risk of Thrombosis laboratory as a permanent INRA Researcher; she currently focuses on fat-soluble micronutrient intestinal absorption and membrane transport. Her group was first to discover a fat-soluble micronutrient membrane transporter at the intestinal level, and still has a leading position on this topic. 

She has received several awards for her work, including the doctoral award of the French Lipidomic Group (2007), the Prize of the French Academia of Medicine (2007), the PepsiCo International Travel Prize (2009), and the Research Prizes of the French Nutrition Society (2010 and 2015).

RICHERT Lysiane, PhD

Biography

Prof. Lysiane Richert has extensive experience in Cell Biology and Toxicology. She received a Ph.D. degree in Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology from the Louis Pasteur University (Strasbourg, France) in 1983. After completing her postdoctoral training at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel) in Cell Biology and Immunology, Lysiane joined Rhône-Poulenc Santé in 1986 as In vitro Toxicologist and in 1992 Rhône Poulenc Agro as Regulatory Toxicologist. In 1993 she became Professor in Cell Biology and Toxicology at the University of Franche-Comté, School of Pharmacy. She founded KaLy-Cell in 2003, by technology transfer, where she operates as Chief Scientific Officer. At KaLy-Cell the focus is on in vitro hepatic models for metabolism and toxicity studies and on ex vivo and in vitro evaluation of inter-species and inter-individual variabilities in the response to exposure.  Lysiane Richert has published over 100 pier-reviewed papers.

SUGIYAMA Yuichi, Ph.D.

Biography

Yuichi Sugiyama started working as the Head of Sugiyama Laboratory in RIKEN, Yokohama, Japan since 2012. He had been the Professor, Department of Molecular Pharmacokinetics at the University of Tokyo since 1991, retired from the University of Tokyo in 2012 and moved to RIKEN. He has made and continues to make internationally acclaimed contributions to the pharmaceutical sciences in diverse areas. These include physiologically-based pharmacokinetic modelling, the prediction of drug clearance from in vitro data, the quantitative prediction of transporter and enzyme mediated drug-drug interactions based on in vitro studies.  His work is internationally recognized by many awards, including AAPS Distinguished Pharmaceutical Scientist Award, 2003, FIP Hoest Madsen Medal in 2009, "Medal with Purple Ribbon" given by Japanese Government in 2010 , B.B.Brodie Award from ASPET in 2012, R.T. Williams Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award (ISSX) in 2013 and Rawls-Palmer Progress in Medicine Award from ASCPT in 2014. He was listed as a top (#1) scientist by ISI in 2007 for the number of citations he received in the preceding 10 years in the field of “Pharmacology and Toxicology”.  He served as the chairman of Board of Pharmaceutical Sciences in FIP (2000-2004). He was also the president of both “International society for the study of xenobiotics (ISSX)”.2006-2007).

TAKANO Mikihisa, PhD

Biography

Mikihisa Takano, Ph.D. is Professor of Graduate School of Biomedical & Health Sciences, Hiroshima University since 1996, and is Dean of School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Hiroshima University since 2016. In 1986 he received his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Kyoto University. Dr. Takano worked at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University as Research Fellow in Medicine (1987-1988), and at Department of Pharmacy, Kyoto University Hospital as Assistant Professor, Lecturer, Associate Professor, and Vice Director (1988-1996). His major research interests are mechanisms of membrane transport of drugs (small and large molecules) and drug/xenobiotic-induced cellular toxicity. The emphasis in recent years has been on the drug transport and toxicity in the lung alveolar epithelial cells. Since 1981, Dr. Takano has published more than 170 primary research papers and more than 50 invited reviews and book chapters.

VISSER Theo, PhD

Biography

Dr. Theo Visser studied organic chemistry at the Technical University in Delft and obtained his PhD degree at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In 1987, he was appointed professor at the Erasmus University Medical Center (Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Endocrinology). His major interest concerns the regulation of thyroid hormone bioactivity in health and disease. He characterized the iodothyronine deiodinases that catalyze the activation or inactivation of thyroid hormone. Also, he demonstrated the importance of transporters for tissue thyroid hormone uptake. His group identified an important thyroid hormone transporter (MCT8) and mutations therein in patients with severe psychomotor retardation. His group was also among the first to identify patients with thyroid hormone resistance caused by mutation of the TRα1 receptor.

VÁRADI András, PhD

Biography

Dr. Váradi is the director of the one of the leading laboratories in ABC protein research, especially in basic biochemistry of these type of transporters. His research group has been organized in the Institute of Enzymology in 1989 focusing on the molecular mechanism of active transport proteins. He started to investigate the molecular mechanism of human multidrug ABC-transporter (MDR1 multidrug resistance protein or P-glycoprotein) and to study the membrane topology and functional domains of the second multidrug transporter, MRP1/ABCC1. He was involved in  elaborating the membrane topology of ABCC1/MRP1, and identified its intracellular regulatory domain. In 2001 he initiated a project to study the function of ABCC6 protein; mutations in ABCC6 gene are associated with pseudoxanthoma elasticum. He established various in vitro ABCC6 expression systems for the very first time, demonstrated its ATP-dependent transport activity and showed that loss of activity is the cause of PXE in the case of certain mutants. He published the first study on the transcriptional regulation of the human ABCC6 gene, and determined the corresponding signal transduction pathway. In collaboration with Dr. Le Saux’ laboratory (Univ. Hawaii), he developed a preclinical animal model for pharmacological correction of disease-causing ABCC6 mutants. Currently his group is focusing on exploiting the knowledge that low plasma pyrophosphate levels underlie the clinical manifestations of pseudoxanthoma elasticum and is active to develop new treatment strategies to treat this and related mineralization disorder. His group very recently demonstrated the oral bio-availability of pyrophosphate, the endogenous inhibitor of soft tissue calcification thus opening avenues for its therapeutical application.

Dr. Váradi has been a regular invited speaker at the FEBS Special Meetings on ABC Proteins, Innsbruck (Austria in 2006, in 2008 in 2014 and in 2018), and at the Gordon Research Conference “Elastin and Elastic Fibers” in 2005; the Meeting of European Physiological Societies (2014 and 2016). He organized special symposia on the molecular background of PXE in Budapest in 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 and in 2017. He was elected to be member of the Academia Europaea in 2013.

WEITZ Dietmar, PhD

Biography

Dr. Dietmar Weitz studied molecular biology at the University of Cologne and finished his diploma with a thesis on the functional regulation of adenylyl cyclases from heart. His PhD work at the Research Centre in Jülich (Helmholtz organisation) was about structural and functional characterization of ion channels. Dr Weitz stayed as a postdoc at the Research Centre and during this time he was also a guest scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK) working on the overexpression, purification, functional reconstitution and crystallization of membrane proteins. Later dr Weitz worked as assistant professor and group leader ‚Nutritional Transporters‘at the Technical University of Munich. Since nearly twelve years he is working at Sanofi (Frankfurt) in Metabolism & Pharmacokinetics and he was responsible for in vitro drug transporter studies and gave expert advice on clinical and preclinical development strategies for drug transporters in many small molecule programs, with some of them reaching submission. Since two years dr Weitz is working full-time as a DMPK project representative for small molecules and biologics.

ZHANG Yan, PhD

Biography

Yan Zhang, PhD, is an Associate Director in the Department of Drug Metabolism, Pharmacokinetics & Clinical Pharmacology (DMPK/CP) at Incyte Corporation in Wilmington, Delaware.  She received her M.Sc. degree from the Pharmacology Department at South Dakota State University and her PhD from the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Nebraska Medical Center.  She has fifteen years’ experiences in oncology drug discovery and more than twenty years’ experience in the field of drug transporters.  Dr. Zhang is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and abstracts.  She serves on the committees of the CPLG Transporter Working Group of the IQ Consortium and the Delaware Valley Drug Metabolism Discussion Group (DVDMDG).  She is currently leading the drug absorption, transporter, and drug-drug interactions (DDI) strategies to support Incyte discovery and development programs.  Research interests include the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, clinical pharmacology, and transporter mediated toxicity and DDI.