MEEX Speakers

ANNAERT Pieter, PharmD., PhD.

Biography

Pieter Annaert is a pharmacist by training and obtained his PhD in pharmaceutical Sciences at KU Leuven in 1998. He conducted 2 years of postdoctoral research in the field of in vitro hepatic drug disposition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After some years at Janssen Pharmaceutica, in the division of preclinical pharmacokinetics, he moved to KU Leuven in 2005, where he currently is full professor at the Drug Delivery and Disposition Lab. Since 2020 he is the chair of the KU Leuven Department of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences. In 2017 he co-founded the CRO BioNotus, specialized in bioanalysis, pharmacometrics and Discovery ADMET.

His research interests are in the field of Mechanistic Pharmacokinetics. This includes the development and application of in vitro models of the liver, as well as physiology based pharmacokinetic modelling and simulation. In addition, his team has particular interest in predicting and understanding perinatal pharmacology and drug-induced cholestasis.

Webinars

• Gaining Mechanistic Insight in Drug Induced Cholestasis: What Can We Learn from Bile Acid Profiling in Human Hepatocytes?

ANZAI Naohiko, M.D., Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Naohiko Anzai is a Full Professor and the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, Dokkyo Medical University School of Medicine, Tochigi, Japan. He received his Bachelor and Ph.D degrees from Chiba University, Japan. First, he worked at Chiba University Hospital as a Resident, and he started his carrier of basic research at the Department of Physiology, Kitasato University Faculty of Medicine. He engaged to the project of renal tubular potassium transport. He then went to Cote d’Azur, focusing on ASIC channel regulation by protein-protein interaction, at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology, CNRS, France. After this he came back to Japan and joined to the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Kyorin University School of Medicine, Tokyo and worked with Professor emeritus Hitoshi Endou and Professor Yoshikatsu Kanai. He extended his research there from ion channels to membrane transporters, particularly that of renal tubular transporters of organic anions, urate, and amino acids. He moved to Dokkyo Medical University School of Medicine, Tochigi, Japan from April 2011. He is a member of the American Physiological Society, American Society of Nephrology, International Society of Nephrology, European Renal Association, and is a Director of the Japanese Society of Digestion and Absorption, an Advisor of the Japanese Society of Hypertension, a Councilor of the Japanese Pharmacological Society, the Physiological Society of Japan, the Japanese Society of Nephrology, and the Japanese Society of Gout and Nucleic Acid Metabolism.

Conferences

• Tokyo 2015

BADOLO Lassina, PhD

Biography

Dr. Lassina Badolo is graduated Pharmacist from Free University of Brussels and took his PhD from the same university. Lassina has both an industry and academia background spending more than 13 years in the industry and 2.5 years as associate professor at the University of Copenhagen. The focus of his research has been on investigating hepatic drug transporter in isolated hepatocytes, assessing the change in function and expression in different culture conditions. Lassina has published more than 25 papers and presented his research as invited speaker in more than a dozen conferences. He has directed a number of master and PhD projects during the last decade. Lassina is currently employed in Discovery DMPK at Lundbeck AS as principal scientist.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

BAJAJ Piyush, PhD

Biography

Piyush Bajaj got his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Dr. Bajaj then did a postdoc at Los Alamos national lab (LANL) developing organs-on-a-chip which could be used for both efficacy and safety assessment. After his postdoc at LANL, Dr. Bajaj moved to Pfizer where he developed/validated protocols for generating human pluripotent stem cell-derived three-dimensional (3D) kidney organoids and was involved in de-risking of potential target organ toxicities using physiologically relevant in vitro models. Dr. Bajaj is now a part of Takeda’s investigative toxicology group where he co-leads liver and kidney de-risking strategies which are applied for proactive management of potential safety liabilities of compounds in the discovery stages.

Conferences

• Boston 2019

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.

Conferences

• Budapest 2018

BENDAYAN, Reina, Pharm.D

Biography

Dr. Reina Bendayan is a Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto. After obtaining a Bachelors of Sciences in Pharmacy and a Hospital Pharmacy Residency Program at the University of Montreal, Dr. Bendayan completed a Doctor of Pharmacy at the University of Florida and a three year Medical Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program in Clinical Pharmacology and Membrane Cell Biology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Bendayan’s research program at the University of Toronto is primarily focused on Membrane Transport and Therapeutics with an emphasis in the field of HIV/AIDS Antiviral Drug Transport and Regulation in the central nervous system. She obtained a five-year young career investigator award from the Ministry of Health of Ontario and her research program is primarily funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research and the Ontario HIV Treatment Network, Ministry of Health of Ontario. She is the author of over 85 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has supervised many graduate students and post-doctoral research fellows. She is a member of several scientific associations, in particular, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), American Association of Pharmaceutical Sciences (AAPS), International Blood-Brain Barrier Society (IBBS), International AIDS Society and Canadian Society of Pharmaceutical Sciences (CSPS). Dr. Bendayan was elected FELLOW of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Sciences (November 2010) and received the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada (AFPC) Research Career Award (June 2013). She is also the recipient of a five-year Career Scientist Award from the Ontario HIV Treatment Network, Ministry of Health of Ontario (2011-2016). Dr. Bendayan served as Graduate Coordinator (1998-2003), Chair and Associate Dean Graduate Education of the Graduate Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences (July 2005-July 2011) and as Acting Dean of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy (January 2007-July 2007).

Conferences

• San Francisco 2014

BENET, Leslie Z., PhD

Biography

Dr. Benet, Professor and former Chairman (1978-1998), Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, received his A.B. (English), B.S. (Pharmacy), M.S. from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. from the University of California. He has received nine honorary doctorates. His research interests, more than 550 publications, 6 books and 12 patents are in the areas of pharmacokinetics, biopharmaceutics, drug delivery and pharmacodynamics. Dr. Benet is listed by Thompson Reuters as one of the most highly cited pharmacologists worldwide, with his published peer-reviewed papers cited more than 24,000 times. His recent work on the interplay of metabolic enzymes and transport proteins as related to oral bioavailability led to development of the Biopharmaceutics Drug Disposition Classification System (BDDCS). Dr. Benet was a Founder and first President of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS). Dr. Benet is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly IOM) of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a member of the International Transporter Consortium.

Webinars

• Transporter-Enzyme and Transporter-Transporter Interplay in Predicting Drug Absorption and Disposition

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017
• San Francisco 2014

BLOOMER, Jackie C.

Biography

Jackie Bloomer has over 25 yrs experience in preclinical Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics (DMPK) with expertise in enzyme methodologies, extrapolation of in vitro data and application of physiologically based pharmacokinetic models. She has implemented in vitro methodologies and strategies in both drug discovery and development environments to assess the risk of clinical drug-drug interactions. She has represented DMPK on drug development project teams from a variety of therapeutic areas and has been responsible for the strategic implementation of scientific initiatives in preclinical DMPK, including the application of modelling and simulation approaches. Jackie is currently a Director in DMPK at GSK leading a team responsible for the mechanistic understanding of drug absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion and the extrapolation of this knowledge to characterise drug disposition and drug interaction risks. Her team apply a wide range of in vitro tools to understand the drug metabolising enzymes and drug transporters involved in the elimination of GSK drugs. In vitro-in vivo extrapolation techniques are used to make an assessment of mechanistic drug-drug interaction risks and dynamic modelling approaches are deployed for quantitative predictions. She is co-chair of the Drug Interaction Advisory Committee within GSK which has the remit of advising project teams on clinical drug interaction issues.

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

BOSQUILLON Cynthia, PhD

Biography

Dr.Cynthia Bosquillon is Lecturer in Drug Delivery at the University of Nottingham, School of Pharmacy, UK. She obtained her Master of Pharmacy and PhD from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Following her PhD, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at King’s College London on a project directed by Prof.Ben Forbes before being awarded a 2 year fellowship that she undertook at the same institution and finally, being appointed to a lectureship at Nottingham. Her research has essentially focussed on drug inhalation, of which she has explored different aspects, from the formulation and characterisation of dry powders to the development of in vitro and ex vivo models of the lungs as tools to predict pulmonary drug absorption in vivo. She has published two book chapters and more than 20 papers in the field, including the first review on drug transporters in the lungs. She has collaborated with the pharmaceutical industry on various lung projects and has been invited to talk at several national and international meetings.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

BOURNER Maureen, Ph.D.

Biography

Maureen Bourner is a Principle Scientist in the ADME/Tox group at Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO. She has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for Monsanto Co./G.D. Searle/Pharmacia Corp./Pfizer, Inc. for the past 20 years. Her responsibilities included project leadership responsibilities in allergy and respiratory where she lead a team of scientists that designed and implemented a testing funnel to triage compounds for the establishment of structure activity relationships for inflammation readouts. In oncology, her team identified new targets through transcriptional profiling and established siRNA transfections conditions in a variety of mammalian cell lines to determine the role of specific genes and pathways in disease modification. As project leader in COPD designed mechanism of action studies to establish confidence in rationale for new targets in COPD with existing compounds known to inhibit the target and developed cell efficacy assays and screening of compounds to identify anti-inflammatory and anti-mucolytic agents for the treatment of COPD. Since joining Sigma-Aldrich in 2010, her primary responsibilities have been to lead a team of scientists to develop novel cell lines and cell based assays using genomic modification techniques in the field of ADME toxicology. Using zinc finger nuclease technology her team has created transporter knock-out cell lines in enterocytes (C2bbe1 cells), liver (HepaRG cells) and kidney (REPTC). She has been a key leader in the establishment of a services group providing transporter assays using these novel cell lines as well as developing methods to provide these cell lines in assay ready format for customers to use in their own laboratories. These novel cell lines have proven to be a valuable tool for clarifying complex drug-transporter interactions which were previously misclassified when traditional chemical or genetic knock down approaches were employed and provide a unique platform for assessing interactions when more than one transporter is involved.

Conferences

• Boston 2015

BOW Daniel, Ph.D.

Biography

Dan Bow leads the drug transporter group at AbbVie, where he is responsible for drug transporter activities and provides pre-clinical DMPK support for multiple discovery and development projects. He received his PhD from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland where his research focused on renal organic anion and cation transport. In 2002, he moved to the United States and continued research in the area of renal transport with a visiting fellow position at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina. Prior to joining AbbVie in 2007, he held a post doctoral position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his research interests were on drug transporter localization in hepatocytes, transporter expression, and canalicular membrane development in the hepatocyte sandwich-culture model. Current research interests include the interpretation of endogenous substrate exposure related to metabolism and transport, drug and drug transporter trafficking, and the translation of pre-clinical transporter data to the clinic. In 2013, he was a co-author on an International Transporter Consortium (ITC) white paper; “In Vitro Methods to Support Transporter Evaluation in Drug Discovery and Development” and in 2014 was invited to join the ITC as a main committee member. Dan chaired the AAPS Drug Transporter Focus Group from 2012-2014, and was recently elected to serve as AAPS section vice chair for PPDM (2015). He has been involved in organization of the bi-annual AAPS Drug Transporter workshop since 2011 and partnered with the ITC to co-chair the 2015 AAPS/ITC Joint Workshop on Drug Transporters.

Conferences

• Boston 2015

BRODIN, Birger, PhD

Biography

Birger Brodin heads the research group "Drug Transporters in ADME" and the Cell Culture Core Facility at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The focus of the research group is the study of membrane transporters and their role in uptake and excretion of drugs and prodrugs across barrier tissues. Birger Brodin is currently investigating how drugs and endogenous substrates pass the small intestine and the blood-brain barrier, and how transport proteins affect this process. Birger Brodin is the author of > 70 scientific articles and book chapters, and several popular science articles, has given > 25 invited talks and is ad hoc referee at > 15 scientific journals.

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

BROUWER R. Kenneth, PhD., RPh.

Biography

Dr. Brouwer is Chief Scientific Officer at Qualyst Transporter Solutions, a company focused on providing solutions to transporter questions that arise during drug discovery and development in the areas of hepatic drug transport (B-CLEAR®), drug interactions, and evaluation of hepatotoxicity. Prior to this, Dr. Brouwer served as Executive Director, Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, at PPD Discovery, USA, where he had responsibility for overseeing the scientific and administrative operations within the preclinical groups at PPD Discovery, including the areas of metabolism, pharmacokinetics, toxicology; absorption technologies, and Pharmazyme groups. Before joining PPD Discovery, he served as Director, Preclinical Development, Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics at GlaxoSmithKline. In addition, he was responsible for the drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics developability strategy leading to candidate selection, review of drug candidate project plans prior to candidate selection, and developing and implementing process to ensure a smooth transition from candidate selection to full development. Over his 18 year tenure at GlaxoSmithKline, Dr Brouwer held positions of increasing responsibility in both Clinical Pharmacokinetics and Drug Metabolism. Dr. Brouwer has successfully lead and directed large international multidisciplinary project teams to support the product development of 4 high priority development candidates. He has been the Drug Metabolism Project Team Leader for 12 Development compounds and 6 Discovery compounds. He has served as the Pharmacokinetics and Drug Metabolism expert at FDA panel presentations for GlaxoSmithKline, and has authored or co-authored over 400 company reports to support ERC, CTX, IND, NDA and MAA regulatory submissions. Dr. Brouwer has over 60 publications in peer reviewed journals, and is the holder of 3 patents. Dr. Brouwer serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and is a reviewer for several additional journals. Dr. Brouwer is an adjunct faculty member in the Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics at the School of Pharmacy, University of North Carolina.

Webinars

• Understanding Hepatobiliary Disposition:The Importance of an Integrative Platform in Evaluating Transporter Interactions

Conferences

• Boston 2015
• San Francisco 2014

BROUWER, Kim, PharmD, PhD

Biography

Dr. Brouwer is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education, UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and Kenan Distinguished Professor in the School of Pharmacy and Curriculum in Toxicology at UNC-Chapel Hill. She received her BS in Pharmacy from Oregon State University, PharmD/Residency training and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences/Pharmacokinetics from the University of Kentucky (UK) College of Pharmacy, and postdoctoral training in Pharmacology/Drug Metabolism in the UK College of Medicine prior to joining the UNC faculty. Dr. Brouwer directs an NIH-funded research program focused on hepatobiliary drug disposition, hepatic transport proteins, and development/refinement of in vitro models to predict in vivo hepatic drug disposition, drug interactions, and hepatotoxicity. Dr. Brouwer was founding Director of the UNC Pharmacokinetics/Pharmacodynamics Fellowship Program and is Co-PI of an NIH-funded Postdoctoral T32 Training Program in Clinical Pharmacology. She has mentored 40 clinical pharmacology fellows, 25 postdoctoral fellows/visiting scholars, 34 doctoral students, 23 undergraduate/honors students, and published >200 research papers, reviews and book chapters. Dr. Brouwer is co-inventor of B-CLEAR®, an in vitro method to assess hepatobiliary disposition that correlates with in vivo data, and is co-founder of Qualyst Transporter Solutions, a UNC spin-off company. She is a member of the International Transporter Consortium Steering Committee, the ASCPT Board of Directors, and she is a member of the following editorial advisory boards: Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, CPT Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology, Clinical and Translational Science, and the AAPS Journal. She served as a member of the NIH Pharmacology Study Section (1998-2002), the NIH Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology Working Group (2010-2012), and co-Chair of the NICHD Pediatric Transporters Working Group (2012-2015). Dr. Brouwer was recognized as an AAPS Fellow in 1998 and received the 2001 PhRMA Foundation Award in Excellence in Pharmaceutics. In 2009, Dr. Brouwer was named a Kenan Distinguished Professor, one of the highest honors bestowed on UNC faculty.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

BROWN Colin, PhD

Biography

Dr Colin Brown was awarded a B.Sc and Ph.D in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of St Andrews Scotland. He then was a Royal Society European Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, followed by a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Manchester.  Until recently, Colin was an Associate Professor at the University of  Newcastle where he focussed on developing in vitro models to study drug transport, drug interactions and toxicity in  kidney, developing  the aProximate in vitro PTC model.  In 2018, Dr Brown joined  Newcells Biotech as Director of ADMET Technologies. 

Webinars

• Predictive cross-species proximal tubule cell models for drug development and safety assessment studies

Conferences

• Seoul 2019
• Budapest 2016
• Tokyo 2015
• Budapest 2014

CALCAGNO Andrea, MD, DTM&H

Biography

Dr Calcagno is temporary Assistant Professor at the University of Torino (Department of Medical Sciences, Infectious Diseases). Infectious Diseases Specialist (University of Torino, Italy); Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand). He is member of the Panel of the Italian Guidelines on the Use of Antiretrovirals and Management of patients living with HIV. He has experience as a Clinicians in Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine (Sudan, Thailand, Burundi); several phase II, III and IV studies in antiretroviral treatment trials. His main field of interest is the clinical pharmacology and pharmacogenetics of anti-infective agents (antiretroviral, antibiotic, antifungals) and the central nervous system complication of HIV-infection.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

Caroline A. Lee, PHD

Biography

Caroline A. Lee is a graduate from the department of Pharmaceutics, University of Washington. Following graduate school, she went to Glaxo as an industrial postdoctoral fellow. As a post-doc, Caroline worked on the co-expression of human cytochrome P450, P450 reductase and cytochrome b5 to produce functional enzyme utilizing the baculovirus/insect cell system. In 1996, she joined Agouron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. as a Research Scientist in the DMPK group. She worked on Viracept, Agouron’s only marketed medicine for HIV (HIV Protease Inhibitor). Agouron was acquired by Warner Lambert and then by Pfizer. With Pfizer, Caroline established a high throughput ADME screening group, providing permeability and P-gp transport information, metabolic stability and CYP mediated drug interaction support to La Jolla’s drug discovery programs. Due to re-organization and centralization of high throughput ADME screening, her group then provided mechanistic enzymology and transporter support to address difficult issues in drug discovery and fulfilling IND or NDA requirements to support filings. In the past several years, she has been involved in various transporter initiatives including contributing author to the PhRMA/DIA Transporter White Paper and leading a Pharmaceutical industry driven project to evaluate the variability in P-gp IC50 and refining appropriate universal in vitro cutoff values to better predict digoxin related DDIs. She is currently working as a consultant in the areas of DM/PK & Transporters.

Webinars

• Managing Digoxin DDI by the P-gp IC50 working group & Practical methods to assess role of hepatic uptake transporters

CHEMUTURI, Nagendra, PhD

Biography

Nagendra Chemuturi received his Bachelor Degree in Pharmacy with Distinction from Kakatiya University in India. He then worked as a pharmaceutical salesman before pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. He was awarded the AAPS Graduate Symposium Award in 2005 for his dissertation work on the role of nasal drug transporters and metabolism in preferential nose-to-brain uptake of dopamine into brain. He started his career in the US at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in MA in 2005. Since then, he has worked at Alcon-Novartis and is currently a Principal Pharmacokineticist with Seattle Genetics characterizing ADME of ADCs. During his career he has served as DMPK lead on several small and large molecule projects and has led efforts to understand the role of drug transporters in ophthalmology and ADCs. He has given podium presentations at several scientific conferences, is active in IQ consortium, leading the MABEL working group and has authored/co-authored several articles and book chapters.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

CHERRINGTON Nathan, Ph.D

Biography

NATHAN J. CHERRINGTON, Ph.D. is a Professor and 1885 Society Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. He is the head of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Director of Graduate Studies in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Arizona. He received a B.S. in Zoology from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in Toxicology from North Carolina State University with an emphasis on xenobiotic metabolism. He then moved to the University of Kansas Medical Center to pursue postdoctoral training in drug metabolism and disposition. He has taught Drug Metabolism and Disposition, Systems Toxicology, Environmental Health Science, and Advanced Toxicology courses since joining the faculty at the University of Arizona in 2002. Nathan has published over 90 original research papers on the sources of inter-individual variability in pharmacogenomics. He serves as an associate editor for Toxicological Sciences, and on the editorial board of Drug Metabolism and Disposition, and Journal of Molecular and Biochemical Toxicology. He has served on numerous NIH study sections where he is a current member of the NIEHS Environmental Health Sciences Review Committee, as well as several committees for the Society of Toxicology and the International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics. He was recently awarded the Achievement Award by the Society of Toxicology, the Alumni Achievement Award from Brigham Young University, and was made a fellow of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences. His current research is on the effect of underlying disease states on an individual’s ability to metabolize and eliminate drugs.

Conferences

• Boston 2015

CHO Choi-Fong, PhD

Biography

Choi-Fong Cho, PhD is an Instructor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School. She is an Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and an Associated Scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She received her PhD in Medical Biophysics at Western University in Canada, which was fully supported by multiple national and provincial scholarships. She later completed her post-doctoral fellowship in Neuro-oncology at BWH, where her fellowship was fully funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research. She was promoted to become a junior faculty member within the Neurosurgery Department in 2017 to initiate her own laboratory. The Cho group at BWH has pioneered an organoid platform to model the blood-brain-barrier in culture for high-throughput screening and analysis of brain-penetrant drugs. They continue to employ this technology for designing novel anti-brain cancer drugs with improved tumor-specificity and delivery into the brain.

Conferences

• Boston 2019

CHU Xiaoyan, Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Xiaoyan Chu is a Senior Principle Scientist in the Department of Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics & Drug Metabolism (PPDM), Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular Pharmacokinetics, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan.  After completing her post-doctoral research at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan, she joined the Department of PPDM at Merck & Co., Inc.  As the scientific leader for the Transporter & In Vitro Technology Group, her main responsibilities are to develop transporter strategies to support Merck discovery and development portfolio, and to evaluate and establish new technologies to study the role of drug transporters in drug disposition and drug-drug interactions. She has authored 70 peer-reviewed research papers, book chapters, and is an invited speaker at over 30 national/international scientific conferences.  She is a member of the International Transport Consortium (ITC) and serves as organizer and steering committee member of various scientific meetings/organizations.

Conferences

• Boston 2019
• Boston 2015

CIRIT, Murat, PhD

Biography

Murat Cirit, PhD, is a Research Scientist at MIT & scientific lead of the Translational Systems Pharmacology Team and System Integration Task in the DARPA-BIOMIMETICS program (“Human Physiome on a Chip”) led by Linda Griffith. MIT and various institutions collaborate in creating a platform that supports ten interacting micro-physiological systems (MPS) and associated sensors for drug testing. Murat completed his PhD at NCSU focusing on systems biology of growth factor-mediated signal transduction pathways. After completion of his PhD, he worked in the pharmaceutical industry focusing on preclinical drug discovery for oncology. He brings an interdisciplinary and systematic approach through his extensive experimental knowledge and computational modeling with an understanding of biological, physiological, and physical processes. His main research experience is systems pharmacology, systems biology, tissue engineering, cell biology and signal transduction networks. His current focus as the scientific lead is integrating various scientific fields to build interacting MPSs by interfacing platform engineering & tissue engineering for pharmacology studies.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2014

DE LANGE Elizabeth, PhD

Biography

Elizabeth de Lange, PhD, is Head of Division of Pharmacology at the Leiden Academic center for Drug Research (LACDR), Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her ultimate aim is to aid in the prediction of the dose-response relationship of CNS drugs in the clinical setting on the basis of preclinical data (translational research) by identification and characterization of the rate and extent of systems processes that govern the dose-response relationship of CNS drugs in health and CNS disorders. This includes not only BBB transport but also intra-brain distribution of drugs and associated CNS effects. To that end, Elizabeth de Lange’s group combines comprehensive preclinical experimentation (intracerebral microdialysis, EEG monitoring, PET scanning, etc) with advanced mathematical modeling. She provides general pharmacokinetic and BBB lecture series for Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences Students. Furthermore, Dr de Lange has been the cofounder and (co-)Chair at the 1st, 2nd and 5th of the series of International Symposia on Microdialysis in Drug Research and Development. She has been the Chair of the Organizing Committee of the 9th International CerebroVascular Biology Conference, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in 2011. Furthermore, she has been the chair of the Microdialysis Focus Group (2005-2007), of the Pharmacokinetics Pharmacodynamics and drug metabolism (PPDM)(2012)section, and OF the Annual Meeting Programming Committee (AMPC) (2014) of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS), With her company In Focus (www.infocus-ecmdelange.nl) she provides courses, training and advice within her area of expertise on microdialysis, PK, PKPD, BBB, and intra-brain distribution.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

DI Li, PhD

Biography

Dr. Li Di has 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical indus­try including Pfizer, Wyeth and Syntex. She is currently a research fellow at Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development, Groton, CT. Her research interests include the areas of drug metabo­lism, pharmacokinetics, drug-drug interactions, absorption, transporters, blood–brain barrier and PBPK modeling and simulation. She has over 180 publications including two books and presented over 100 invited lectures. She is a recipient of the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, the New Jersey Association for Biomedical Research Outstanding Woman in Science Award, the Wyeth President’s Award and Peer Award for Excellence.

Webinars

• Evolving Approaches on Measurements and Applications of Intracellular Free Drug Concentration and Kpuu in Drug Discovery

Conferences

• Boston 2019

EL-KATTAN, Ayman, PhD

Biography

Dr. Ayman El-Kattan is Executive Director and DMPK LEAD Head at IFM Therapeutics. Previously, he was Associate Research Fellow at the Pharmacokinetics, Dynamics, and Metabolism Department, Pfizer Inc. Cambridge Laboratories where he worked for 17 years. He earned his bachelor degree in pharmacy with distinction from University of Jordan and a Ph.D. in Basic Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of South Carolina in the US. His main research interests are focused on understanding the role of transporters in influencing drug disposition and oral absorption. Also, it involves studying the utility of physiological based pharmacokinetic modeling (PBPK) tools in projecting drug disposition and drug-drug interaction liabilities in man for new molecular entities (NME). He is also an Adjunct Professor at College of Pharmacy-University of Rhode Island in Rhode Island, US where he lectures in the graduate-level pharmacokinetic courses and serves as external advisor on dissertation committees.  Dr. El-Kattan is active member of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) and serves on the committee of the Drug Transporter community. He has been invited speaker over 50 times at national and international conferences and meetings and has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed Journals and book chapters. Dr. El-Kattan also published a book by Wiley and titled: Oral Bioavailability Assessment: Basics and Strategies for Drug Discovery and Development (Wiley Series on Pharmaceutical Science and Biotechnology: Practices, Applications and Methods).

Webinars

• ECCS Class 3A: Interaction of Gabapentin and its Analogues with Transporters – a love-hate relationship

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

ELLENS, Harma, PhD

Biography

Dr Ellens received her PhD from the Department of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her thesis project involved investigation of the utility of liposomes as carriers for sustained release of drugs in cancer chemotherapy. She then went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, investigating molecular mechanisms of membrane fusion. Subsequent to her postdoctoral fellowship she joined the Drug Delivery Department at SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) and later transferred to the Department of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics. She is currently Director of the Mechanism and Extrapolation Technologies (MET) group in the DMPK Department at GlaxoSmithKline, Philadelphia. The MET group performs in vitro studies to investigate mechanisms of absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination of drug candidates to assess the risk, and explain the mechanisms, of clinical drug-drug interactions. She has published over 50 papers in refereed journals, including 8 papers on Pgp transport kinetics. She also served as outside reader on several PhD committees at Drexel University.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2014

ELMQUIST, William F., PhD

Biography

William F. Elmquist is currently Professor and Department Head at the University of Minnesota, Department of Pharmaceutics. He received his pharmacy degree at the University of Florida, and Pharm.D. and Ph.D. (pharmacokinetics) from the University of Minnesota. His research has studied the influence of active efflux transporters in the blood-brain barrier (BBB) on CNS drug distribution. An important project currently underway is examining the determinants of anticancer drug permeability in the blood-brain barrier to improve the treatment of brain tumors. Long-term objectives of Dr. Elmquist's research include examining expression and regulation of transport systems in key tissues that influence drug disposition, and how variability in expression, either genetically or environmentally controlled, may contribute to variability in drug response in the patient. Dr. Elmquist has long been a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry and the NIH, served on many journal editorial boards, and is a Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS).

Conferences

• San Francisco 2014

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.

Conferences

• Budapest 2018

FIGG William Douglas, Ph.D

Biography

Dr. William Douglas Figg received his BS in Biology from Georgetown College, his BS in Pharmacy from Samford University and his doctoral degree from Auburn University. He completed his internship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital and his fellowship in Drug Development at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also received an MBA degree from a combined program at Columbia University and the London Business School. Dr. Figg joined the National Cancer Institute in 1992. The following year he became head of the Molecular Pharmacology Section and the Clinical Pharmacology Program. Since then his research has focused on using pharmacological principles to optimize the treatment of cancer and on identifying genes involved in the development of prostate cancer. He has been the PI of over 25 clinical trials for men with metastatic prostate cancer. Dr. Figg has over 625 peer-reviewed publications. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Leon Goldberg Award from ASCPT, the Allen J Brands Award from US Public Health Service, the Russell R. Miller Award from ACCP, the Andrew Craigie Award from AMSUS and the Sustained Contribution to the Scientific Literature award from ASHP. Dr. Figg is adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and serves as adjunct at several schools of pharmacy throughout the country.

Conferences

• Boston 2015

FISCHER David, PhD

Biography

Dr. David Fischer joined Charles River in 2014, through the acquisition of the services division from Galapagos, which he had joined in 2005. During these years, he has taken a leadership role in a number of early stage drug discovery programs in rare and orphan disease indications, including Cystic Fibrosis, Huntington’s Disease, ALS, Usher III Syndrome and DMD and additional indications such as metabolism, oncology, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, resulting in several pre-clinical candidates. He brings expertise in complex and primary cell-based assays, including iSPC and hESC stem cells models and human primary cell models and their application for drug discovery and functional genomics.

David holds a degree in Chemistry and a PhD in Molecular Genetics, both from Leiden University.  During six years of post-doctoral fellowships at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam (an Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and the Free University Amsterdam he focused on neurodegenerative diseases, in particular Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s Disease.  David also mentored two graduate students, at the University of Amsterdam and at Leiden University.  He has published over peer-reviewed papers and 60 patent applications.

FONSI Massimiliano, PhD

Biography

Dr. Fonsi is currently responsible of the DMPK department at Citoxlab, a Charles River company, with a role that is both managerial and scientific. He has more than twenty years’ experiences in drug discovery and development and particularly in the field of drug metabolism and metabolism mediated toxicity and DDI. Before joining Citoxlab, he worked at Merck MSD, UCB, Addex, where he has actively participated in the discovery of Zolinza, Isentress, Niraparib, Grazoprevir and other candidate drugs currently in clinical phase. His area of competence covers both discovery and regulatory ADME, including toxicokinetics.  Dr. Fonsi is actively involved, in collaboration with academia and biotech companies, in developing new in vitro ADMET models (essentially for hepatotoxicity and thyroid toxicity via (secondary) hepatic enzyme modulation) for the determination of likelihood of human adverse outcomes using complementary in vitro and in silico models for interspecies extrapolation. Dr. Fonsi has been member of the scientific committee of the French “Groupe de Métabolisme et Pharmacocinétique” (GMP) congress in the recent past. Starting from 2019 he is also member of the steering board of the GMP organization.

Conferences

• Seoul 2019

GANAPATHY Vadivel, PhD

Biography

Dr. Vadivel Ganapathy received his Ph. D. in biochemistry from the University of Madras, India in 1978. He joined the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, GA in the United States in 1979 for his post-doctoral training. He has cloned and characterized more than 40 mammalian transporters; these transporters mediate the cellular uptake of amino acids, vitamins, monocarboxylates, citric acid cycle intermediates, carnitine, and drugs. He has published 485 full-length papers and 30 reviews/book chapters. His Google Scholar citation h-index is 96. In recognition of his contributions to the field of nutrient transporters, he was awarded the Rank Prize for Nutrition in 2004, which he shared with two other scientists. To date, he has trained 13 Ph. D. students and mentored more than 15 post-doctoral fellows. His current lab consists of 5 graduate students (2 PhD. and 3 MD/PhD) and 4 post-doctoral fellows. Presently, he is a Grover Murray Professor and the Chair and also the Welch Endowed Chair in Biochemistry in the Department of Cell Biology and Biochemistry at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, TX, USA. His research areas include colitis, colon cancer, breast cancer, host-microbiome interaction, iron homeostasis, G-protein-coupled receptors for metabolites, obesity, and Alzheimer’s disease. He holds several patents related to therapeutic strategies for inflammatory bowel disease and cancer. He also teaches medical students various aspects of biochemistry and physiology, and has received numerous awards and recognition for outstanding teaching and innovation in education.   

Conferences

• Boston 2019

GIACOMINI, Kathleen M, PhD

Biography

Dr. Kathy Giacomini is Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics from the State University of New York at Buffalo and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Dr. Giacomini is considered a leader in the field of pharmacogenomics of membrane transporters. She led the discovery of coding region variants of about 50 membrane transporters that play a role in drug response in ethnically diverse populations. Dr. Giacomini and her group functionally characterized over 100 transporter variants in cells, discovering both gain of function and loss of function variants that may lead to variation in drug response. She has received numerous awards for her research including the Dawson Award of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy; the Research Achievement Award in Drug Metabolism from the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists and the Rawls Palmer Award from the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. She is an elected member of the National Institute of Medicine.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2014

GOTTESMAN Michael, M.D.

Biography

Dr. Gottesman has been Deputy Director for Intramural Research at NIH since 1993. A graduate of Harvard College summa cum laude and Harvard Medical School magna cum laude, Dr. Gottesman completed an internship and residency in medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He was a research associate at NIH from 1971 to 1974. He returned to Harvard Medical School as an assistant professor before returning to NIH in 1976. Dr. Gottesman became Chief of the Laboratory of Cell Biology in the National Cancer Institute in 1990. From 1992 to 1993, he was Acting Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, and he was Acting Scientific Director of the NCHGR in 1993. His research interests have ranged from how DNA is replicated in bacteria to how cancer cells elude chemotherapy. He has published extensively on these subjects, with over 500 scientific publications to his credit. He has helped to identify the human gene that causes cancer cells to resist many anticancer drugs. He has shown that this gene encodes a protein (P-glycoprotein, an ATP-binding cassette transporter) that pumps anticancer drugs out of drug-resistant human cancers and has used this information to create gene transfer vectors and to circumvent drug resistance in cancer. More recently his work has focused on the complexity of drug resistance in human cancers and the role of ABC transporters in contributing to this resistance. He has been a member of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) since 2003, the American Association of Physicians since 2007, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009. For his work on multidrug resistance in cancer, he is a recipient of the Milken Family Medical Foundation Cancer Research Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) Award, and the Vallee Foundation Award in Biomedical Research. Dr. Gottesman has been actively involved in initiating several training and mentoring programs for high school students and teachers, as well as college, medical, and graduate students. As Deputy Director for Intramural Research at NIH, he has initiated an NIH-wide lecture series, and reformulated tenure and review processes in the intramural program. He has also instituted training programs for minority and disadvantaged students, loan repayment programs for clinical researchers at NIH, research training programs for medical students, and research integrity training activities for NIH fellows.

Conferences

• Boston 2015

GRINDSTAFF, Kent, PhD

Biography

Mr. Grindstaff will act as the chairman of the 2nd Day of the conference. With more than 12 years experience in early-stage drug development and transporter biology at Biopharmaceutical and Contract Research organizations, Dr. Grindstaff manages SOLVO’s operations in the Untied States and Canada since June 2012. Prior to joining SOLVO USA, he was head of research at Optivia Biotechnology, a transporter focused CRO and Biotechnology company based in Menlo Park, CA, USA. From 2000 to 2010, he held numerous scientific positions, most recently as Principal Investigator, at XenoPort Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA. Dr. Grindstaff has a Ph.D. in Molecular Cell Biology and Biochemistry from Washington University, Saint Louis, MO, USA and completed a Senior Post-doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, reviews, and grant applications related to epithelial barrier models and transporters.

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

HANNA, Imad, PhD

Biography

Dr. Imad Hanna is a Group leader in the Department of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in East Hanover, NJ. Dr. Hanna obtained his B.S. degree in Biochemistry from Oakland University in Rochester, MI. and his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. Following a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Center in Molecular Toxicology at Vanderbilt University, Imad joined the Pharmaceutical industry in 2000. Currently, Imad’s group provides drug metabolism and transport support for the registration of clinical drug candidates. Imad is a member of a global team defining scientific/business strategies to assess potential drug interactions with respect to drug transporters. In this regard, he and his colleagues have implemented a number of cell-based drug transport assays in support of this strategy, as well as providing support to ongoing key projects.

Conferences

• Tokyo 2015
• Budapest 2014

HARIPARSAD, Niresh, PhD

Biography

Dr. Niresh Hariparsad, PhD is a Director, at Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. Dr. Hariparsad received his B. Pharm. and MMed Sc (Clin Pharm) degrees from the University of Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa. Dr Hariparsad received his PhD from the University of Cincinnati and worked as a Senior Research Chemist in the Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics Department at Merck and Co. before joining Vertex in 2010. His research interests include the use of novel tools to predict drug-drug interaction risk in the clinic.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

HEREDI-SZABO Krisztina, PhD

Biography

Krisztina Herédi-Szabó, PharmD, PhD, has a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Szeged, Hungary. She has earned her PhD in the field of peptide chemistry and cell biology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, USA in 2005. She has joined Solvo Biotechnology in 2006 and started working in the field of transporter proteins. She was involved in the development of several transporter assays that are now available as products and services. She is an author of 21 scientific publications and presented her group’s work at several international conferences. Her current position is Head of Service laboratory at Solvo Biotechnology, Szeged, Hungary.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

HILGENDORF Constanze, PhD

Biography

Constanze Hilgendorf holds a Pharmacist license and received her PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Pharmacokinetics from Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany in 1999, in collaboration with Astra Hässle, Sweden and the University of Michigan, AnnArbor, USA. After working in contract research in Germany, she joined AstraZeneca R&D in Sweden in 2002. Since then she held a range of scientific and leadership roles, as DMPK drug project lead as well as ADME expert supporting all therapy areas with expertise in drug disposition and DDI. She is currently head of ADME and Bioanalysis in Cardiovascular, Renal and Metabolism (CVRM) DMPK, supporting both drug discovery and development portfolio for all drug modalities, accountable for experimental ADME science strategies, and education and training of DMPK-scientists. Her core scientific interests are the development of translatable in-vitro ADME models (drugtransporters, organ disposition, PGx, and DDI), combined with understanding of impact of disease on organ function and interspecies differences. She has published more than 30 peer reviewed research papers from all aspects of ADME, from SAR of permeability and transport beyond rule-of-five, MS imaging of intestinal absorption, or PBPK-modelling of hepatic drug disposition.

HOWELL Brett, PhD

Biography

Brett A. Howell is the President of DILIsym Services, a Simulations Plus company developing and using DILIsym and other software tools to improve the development of safer and more effective drug therapies. He is also an associate director of the DILI-sim Initiative since its inception in 2011. In addition to overseeing DILIsym Services operations, Dr. Howell also helps guide the architecture and use of the DILIsym modeling software. Dr. Howell has published over 30 scientific papers in the areas of PBPK/PD modeling, in vitro toxicity testing, novel drug delivery systems, and drug safety. He has given invited scientific presentations at numerous national and international meetings, including the Society of Toxicology annual meeting, the Japanese Society of Toxicology annual meeting, the annual FDA/AASLD Drug-Induced Liver Injury meeting, the American Conference on Pharmacometrics (ACOP) annual meeting, the European Microsomes and Drug Oxidations annual meeting, and the Drug Information Association (DIA) annual safety meeting. He serves on the editorial board for the prominent Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) journal, “CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology,” published by the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. Dr. Howell holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Florida and Bachelor of Science degrees in chemical engineering and textile engineering from North Carolina State University.

Webinars

• Combining transporter data with quantitative systems toxicology modeling (DILIsym) to impact decisions in drug development

Conferences

• Boston 2019

HUISMAN, Maarten, PhD

Biography

Maarten was driven by ‘doing something useful for patients’ and studied Biology at the U Groningen, and obtained his PhD in 2003 at the Netherlands Cancer Institute focusing mainly on the role of multidrug transporters on the (pre)clinical pharmacokinetics of multidrug transporters. He then worked as a post-doc in a small biotech company, HepArt (academic spin-off), aiming to develop a bio-artificial liver. In 2006 he joined Janssen Pharmaceutica in Belgium (Johnson & Johnson) as a study director of pre-clinical DMPK studies. In 2007 he became team leader of the In vitro DMPK lab team and the In vivo DMPK lab team (2010). From 2007 to December 2011 he led the Center of Expertise on Drug Transporters within J&J. Since January 2012 he was accepted in an internal 2-year program, called Bridges, to also gain experience in drug discovery and to keep bridging the Discovery and Development parts of the organization. In 2014, he continued in a role in Discovery Sciences.

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

HURLEY Chris, PhD

Biography

Dr. Chris Hurley has 18 years of experience within the drug discovery industry and contract research sector, he is Director of Chemistry at Charles River Laboratories in Harlow, United Kingdom.  He has led or overseen multi-disciplinary teams through the drug discovery process providing strategic oversight from hit-identification to lead optimisation and pre-clinical candidate selection which has resulted in 8 pre-clinical candidates with 3 compounds progressing to the clinic. He co-invented a targeted delivery system for genetic material to cells which has now been commercialised. Chris received his MSci degree in Medicinal Chemistry from UCL in 1999 and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from UCL in 2003 and  he has published 25 papers and abstracts, and been named inventor on over 25 patents.

HUTH Felix, PhD

Biography

Dr. Felix Huth has a broad scientific background in PK sciences. Originally, a chemist by training with an emphasis on analytical organic chemistry, he has received his PhD from the University of Göttingen, Germany. After  a position in a biotechnological start up company, he joined Altana Pharma as PK scientist for biotransformation. He could extend he knowledge in bioanalytics, enzyme and transporter kinetics and PBPK modeling before joining Novartis as team lead PBPK modeling. His current work involves early and late stage transporter science, PBPK modeling and general DDI strategies for projects.

James Duncan, PhD

Biography

Dr. James S. Duncan is an Associate Professor of Cancer Biology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. He received his PhD from the University of Western Ontario, then performed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina. There he developed a proteomics strategy that provides a systems biology platform to profile global kinome activity in any cell line or tumor biopsy.
Dr. Duncan’s laboratory at Fox Chase applies similar proteomics approaches to explore drug resistance mechanisms in several cancer models. He has received numerous accolades for his work, including research awards from the Sandy Rollman Ovarian Cancer Foundation, the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance, the American Cancer Society, and the NIH.

Webinars

• MDR1 Promotes Intrinsic and Acquired Resistance to PROTACs in Cancer Cells – a Case Report

JANSEN, Gerrit, PhD

Biography

Dr. Gerrit Jansen obtained his PhD degree in Biochemstry at the State University of Utrecht, The Netherlands in 1984. From 1985-1990 he held a post-doctoral position at the Utrecht University Medical Center (Dept. of Oncology). In 1991 he moved to the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam (Dept. of Medical Oncology). From 1992-1994 he was a recipients of a fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, which was followed by a senior postdoctoral position at the VU University Medical Center (Dept. of Medical Oncology). In 2001 he moved to the Department of Rheumatology (currently Amsterdam Rheumatology and immunology Center) at the VU University Medical Center to become head of the laboratory for experimental rheumatology. Dr. Jansen’s main research interest focuses on molecular mechanisms of drug resistance, with a special interest for resistance mechanisms to classical (e.g. antifolates) and experimental drugs from an anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer perspective.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016
• Budapest 2014

JOHNSON, William W., Ph.D

Biography

Dr. William W. Johnson earned his Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry at the University of Maryland, USA, in 1994. He held a postdoctoral position at Vanderbilt University, USA, from 1994-1997 (INRSA, NIH, with F.P. Guengerich). He worked as a principal scientist at the Schering-Plough Research Institute, Lafayette, NJ, USA, from 1997-2003, which was followed by the position of Associate Director at OSI Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Boulder, CO, USA. In 2010 he continued his career as an Associate Director at GlaxoSmithKline, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA. He joined SOLVO Hungary in 2012 as Vice President, Director of Global Operations. Dr. Johnson’s main research interest concentrates on transporters, DM/PK, hepatotoxicity, bioactivation, metabolism, and drug interaction.

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

KALVASS J. Cory, Ph.D.

Biography

J. Cory Kalvass, Ph.D., is a Senior Principal Research Scientist in Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics at AbbVie. He received dual bachelor degrees in Biochemistry and Chemistry from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina. He has 18 years experience as an ADME / PK/PD scientist in drug discovery, working at Pfizer, Eli Lilly and AbbVie. Dr. Kalvass’ research interests include the study of CNS drug penetration and action, including transporter kinetics, as well as applying PK/PD approaches for establishing in-vitro-to-in-vivo and preclinical-to-clinical correlations. He is a champion of “free drug hypothesis” and has refined equilibrium dialysis methods to better estimate free drug levels in in vitro incubations, plasma, brain as well as other tissues. He is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts. Dr. Kalvass is recipient of a number of awards including 2009 AAPS Meritorious Manuscript Award.

Conferences

• Boston 2015

KATO Yukio, PhD

Biography

Dr. Yukio Kato graduated University of Tokyo in 1990 and received Ph.D.

degree in 1998. He was appointed Research Associate in University of Tokyo in 1993, Visiting Fellow in National Institutes of Health, USA in 2001, Associate Professor in Kanazawa University in 2002, and Full Professor in Kanazawa University in 2008. He was also assigned in 2012 to a Visiting Research Staff in Sugiyama Laboratory, RIKEN.

His major research interests are transporter-mediated drug disposition, efficacy and toxicity, transporter-related inflammation and diseases, and protein-protein interaction and functional regulation of xenobiotic transporters. He published 159 original research articles including 5 Nature journal series papers, and 13 review articles.

Conferences

• Tokyo 2017
• Tokyo 2015

KENNA Gerry, PhD

Biography

Dr. Gerry Kenna is a Drug Safety Consultant based in Cheshire, UK. He has extensive experience of safety assessment of pharmaceuticals and other chemicals and of toxicity testing and of mechanisms that underlie human adverse drug reactions, most notably liver toxicity. This was acquired while working as Scientific Director of FRAME (the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments; www.frame.org.uk); in industry for AstraZeneca, Syngenta and Zeneca; and in academia at Imperial College School of Medicine, London UK; National Institutes of Health, MD USA; King’s College Hospital Medical School, London UK and the National Institute for Medical Research, London UK. Dr. Kenna continues to be actively involved in research on the mechanisms which underlie human adverse drug reactions and on the development and implementation of novel predictive safety screening strategies that take account of hepatobiliary transporter inhibition, metabolic bioactivation and immune responsiveness, plus PBPK-based in vitro/in vivo exposure scaling. He is also committed to implementation of improved human safety testing strategies that reduce, refine and replace a need for procedures on animals. Dr Kenna received a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Leeds UK and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of London UK. He has authored or co-authored >100 scientific publications and is a member of the International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics, and a Fellow of the British Toxicology Society.

Webinars

• Role of inhibition of the bile salt export pump (BSEP) in drug induced liver injury

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

KEOGH, John, MSB, CBiol

Biography

John Keogh (MSB, CBiol; jpkeogh@virginmedia.com) is an independent DMPK consultant with JPK Consulting. His client base includes UCB Chiesi and Astellas. He has over 25 years drug development experience with Glaxo SmithKline (GSK), and whilst here was a key player in the development and application of transporter science expertise to facilitate drug discovery and development. He is an industry expert in membrane transporter science and strategies, is experienced in interpreting and contextualizing DMPK data to solve issues and challenges in drug development, and in refining strategies in this emerging scientific discipline. He has a wealth of specialist expertise in the evaluation of drug-drug interaction challenges, notably in the drug transporter field. John’s client services include training, practical advice on assay development and interpretation, and assistance in regulatory document preparation. John is a champion for excellence and education in the transporter field, publishing and lecturing regularly. He is an active member of a team currently working on a comprehensive volume of transporter sciences for publication in the RSC Drug Discovery Series in 2015.

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

KEPPLER Dietrich, MD

Biography

Professor Dietrich Keppler received his MD degree from the University of Freiburg, Germany, and subsequently specialized in Biochemistry and became professor of Biochemistry at Freiburg University. In 1987 he became Full Professor of Tumor Biochemistry at the University of Heidelberg and head of the Division of Tumor Biochemistry of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). His pioneering contributions in the transporter field included ATP-dependent transport across the hepatocyte canalicular membrane and mechanisms of cholestasis; elucidation of the function of the multidrug resistance protein 1 (MRP1; ABCC1) as a conjugate export pump; discovery, cloning, and characterization of the apical multidrug resistance protein MRP2 (ABCC2) deficient in Dubin-Johnson syndrome; localization and characterization of MRP3, MRP4, and MRP5. The localization and characterization of the human uptake transporters OATP1B1 and OATP1B3 enabled the generation of multiple-transfected polarized cells stably expressing OATP uptake transporters and MRP efflux pumps as in vitro models for vectorial transport. Dietrich Keppler has received numerous awards including: Prix Galien (Galenus award) for research on the role of cysteinyl leukotrienes in endotoxin action (1985); Heinrich Wieland Prize for research on metabolism and analysis of leukotrienes (1987); Lucie Bolte Award of the German Association for the Study of the Liver (GASL) for achievements in research on liver diseases (2004); International Adolf Windaus Prize for outstanding publications in the field of bile acid research (2016). He is the author or coauthor of >300 publications, with >34 400 citations (Hirsch index=98).

KHETANI R. Salman, Ph.D

Biography

Dr. Khetani received his BS degrees, summa cum laude, in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering from Marquette University, and MS and PhD degrees in bioengineering from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He was a Jacobs fellow and National Science Foundation graduate fellow at UCSD. Dr. Khetani conducted his postdoctoral studies at MIT in the laboratory of Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia, professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and a world-renowned leader in multi-scale liver tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Dr. Khetani’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Drug Metabolism and Disposition, Toxicological Sciences, Nature Biotechnology and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2007, Dr. Khetani co-founded Hepregen Corporation and led research there as director of research from 2008 to 2011 in order to bring to market bioengineered models of animal and human livers for pharmaceutical drug development. Dr. Khetani then started his academic faculty career in the department of mechanical engineering and school of biomedical engineering at Colorado State University (2011-2015) and recently transitioned as associate professor of bioengineering to University of Illinois at Chicago where he directs the Microfabricated Tissue Models laboratory. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award, and his research (past and current) has been funded by DOD, FDA, NIH, NSF, the State of Colorado, and major pharmaceutical companies.

Webinars

• The potential of engineered human liver co-cultures in phenotypic drug discovery for liver diseases
• The utility of microscale human liver co-cultures for investigating drug toxicity outcomes
• Using micropatterned co-cultures to model human-specific drug metabolism, disposition and drug-drug interactions
• Engineering Micropatterned Co-cultures for Drug Development

Conferences

• Boston 2015

KLUKOVITS Anna, PhD

Biography

Anna Klukovits has over 16 years’ experience working in the field of experimental pharmacology. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Medicine while studying the neural regulation of uterine functions during pregnancy in the rat. Started to work as Assistant Professor at the Department of Pharmacodynamics and Biopharmacy, at University of Szeged, Hungary and focused on finding potential new targets to treat premature birth. She spent 12 months as a visiting professor at Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami (FL) while conducting cell-based studies as well as in vivo animal studies in experimental oncology, in the research group of Nobel-laureate Andrew V. Schally. Anna joined SOLVO Biotechnology as Study Manager in 2012, now working as member of the European Market Group, where she is responsible for providing scientific consultation and coordinating contract research services with European Customers. She is the author of 20 research papers including reviews and of numerous presentations.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

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.

Conferences

• Boston 2019
• Budapest 2018
• Tokyo 2017
• San Francisco 2017
• Budapest 2016
• Boston 2015
• Tokyo 2015
• Budapest 2014

KRAMER D. Stefanie, PhD

Biography

Stefanie D. Krämer is Adjunct Professor for Biopharmacy at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland). She studied Pharmaceutical Sciences at the ETH Zurich and after some practice as a pharmacist in a public pharmacy got her Ph.D. in natural sciences at the ETH. She strengthened her expertise in physico-chemical compound characterization and blood-brain barrier models during post-doctoral stays at Sanofi Recherche in Montpellier (F) and King’s College in London (UK). Back at the ETH, she habilitated in 2007 in Biopharmacy (Drug Interactions with Lipid Bilayers and P glycoprotein) and is since 2009 involved in Radiopharmacology/Preclinical PET of Radiopharmaceutical Sciences at the ETH. Main research interests of Stefanie Krämer are kinetics of drug-lipid bilayer and transporter-mediated permeation, characterization of ADME (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion) properties of drugs and PET tracers, preclinical PET, in particular PET kinetic modeling and imaging of inflammatory processes. She teaches Biopharmacy/Pharmacokinetics (lecture and practical) and Biotransformation of Drugs and Xenobiotics (lecture) at the ETH. She co-authored the two-volume text book The Biochemistry of Drug Metabolism (Wiley) and has published more than 80 research papers. She wrote the Java applications PharmaCalc v02 and PharmaCalcCL to simulate plasma-concentration time curves (available on www.biopharmacy.ethz.ch).

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

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.

Conferences

• Budapest 2018
• Budapest 2016

KUSUHARA Hiroyuki, PhD

Biography

Hiroyuki Kusuhara received his BSc, MSc and PhD (Pharmaceutical Sciences) from the University of Tokyo (Japan).

Hiroyuki started his carrier as an academic scientist in The University of Tokyo as Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences (1998). He was promoted to Associate Professor (2004) and Professor (2012) of Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo. He is currently professor and chair of Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacokinetics at Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

Hiroyuki’s major research interest encompass interindividual variability in human drug

Disposition, specifically: identification of drug transporters in the tissue distribution, and clearance; pharmacokinetics; modeling and simulation; in vitro-in vivo extrapolation; PK imaging; drug-drug interactions; and metabolomics. He is the author of 180 research papers in these areas.

Member of ISSX since 2013. Most recent ISSX activities include Scientific Affairs Committee (2014-2016), and Nominations Committee (2014-2016). Hiroyuki has experience as Council and Director in Japanese societies; JSSX Council (2004-present), Director (2014-2017); APSTJ Council (2010-present), Director (2017-present). Editorial Board membership: Drug Metabolism & Disposition; Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences; Biopharmaceutics and Drug Disposition. Society membership: ISSX, ASCPT, and Japanese Societies; JSSX, JSCPT, APSTJ, JPS and JSDDS.

Conferences

• Tokyo 2017

KYUNGHEE YANG, PH.D

Biography

Kyunghee Yang, Ph.D., is a scientist for DILIsym Services, Inc. and software developer working on the DILI-sim Initiative modeling team. Dr. Yang’s research focuses on the computational modeling of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) regarding interference of bile acid transport by hepatotoxic drugs Dr. Yang received her B.S. in pharmacy and M.S. in pharmacokinetics from Seoul National University, South Korea, and Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her graduate research focused on defining the mechanisms of DILI involving the interactions in efflux of bile acids and drugs. As a result of her research, she earned numerous fellowship awards. Dr. Yang has published scientific papers in the areas of drug metabolism and transport, regulation of drug metabolizing enzymes during pregnancy, and systems pharmacology modeling of DILI. She has been invited to speak at multiple scientific meetings including the FDA DILI Conference and ASCPT Annual Meeting. She has worked closely with the DILIsym modeling team since 2011 and joined the team in 2014.

Webinars

• Combining transporter data with quantitative systems toxicology modeling (DILIsym) to impact decisions in drug development

LAI Yurong, PhD

Biography

Dr. Lai is currently Sr. director of Drug Metabolism at Gilead Sciences. He is Fellow of American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Rhode Island. His current role in Gilead is to manage and implement in vitro/in vivo preclinical and clinical strategies for compound advancement to regulatory filing. He received his M.D from Fujian Medical University in China and his Ph.D. (Toxicology) from Sapporo Medical University in Japan in 1998. Prior to joining Gilead, Dr. Lai led research programs at Pfizer and BMS in transporter research and ADME-PK-Tox. He is the associate editor/editorial board member of top ranking DMPK journals including DMD, BDD, JPS and Frontier Pharmacology etc. He is a patent inventor and the author of a book, book chapters and over 160 original publications.

Webinars

• Endogenous Biomarkers to Detect Transporter Drug-drug Interactions: the Recent Updates

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

LANGER, Oliver, PhD

Biography

Oliver Langer was born in 1971 in Vienna, Austria. He studied pharmacy at the University of Vienna and graduated with a Master’s degree in 1995. He obtained his PhD degree at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden in 2000, where he specialized in the development of radiotracers for the imaging of neurotransmitter systems with positron emission tomography (PET). During his PhD studies he spent 3 years as a research fellow at the Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot (French Atomic Energy Commission, CEA) in Orsay, France. Since 2002 he has been employed at the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Medical University of Vienna (Austria), where he became Associate Professor (“Privatdozent”) in Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry in 2006. In 2010, he became Senior Scientist at Austrian Institute of Technology in Seibersdorf, which is Austria’s largest non-university research organization. In his research, he uses preclinical and clinical PET to address different questions related to drug disposition and pharmacodynamics.

Webinars

• Imaging of ABC transporters at the blood-brain barrier with positron emission tomography

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

LEE Wooin, PhD

Biography

Wooin Lee obtained her PhD degree at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University at Buffalo, SUNY in the USA. She did her postdoctoral training at the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. After that, she joined the research faculty working closely with clinical oncologists and the early drug development team at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. She was an Assistant and Associate Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Kentucky. In 2014, she moved back to South Korea and is currently an Associate Professor at the College of Pharmacy, Seoul National University. Her research interest lies in understanding the genetic, epigenetic and molecular bases for variable drug response and drug interactions with a focus on membrane transporters and developing novel anticancer drugs targeting the proteasomes and their delivery strategies to achieve desirable pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profiles. She has also been pursuing research in pharmacokinetic modeling and simulation using preclinical and clinical data. She has authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications. 

Conferences

• Seoul 2019

LI Yutai, PhD

Biography

Yutai Li obtained her BS in 1986 from Liaoning University, China and Ph.D.  in 1995 from North Carolina State University. She worked at DuPont, Schering Plough, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before she joined the proteomics and metabolomics group in Merck & Co. in 2004.  She currently works on toxicity biomarker discovery using LC-MS based metabolomics approach. Also, she has been working on drug induced liver injury due to transporter inhibition using rodent models.

Conferences

• Boston 2019

LIPPMANN, Ethan, PhD

Biography

Ethan Lippmann holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a doctoral degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation focused on using various stem cell sources to model the blood-brain barrier (BBB) in vitro. Notably, under the supervision of Eric Shusta and Sean Palecek, he devised a method to differentiate human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into endothelial cells possessing a blood-brain barrier (BBB) phenotype. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery where he is developing novel hPSC differentiation methods to facilitate discrete control of neural fates.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2014

LIRAS Jennifer, PhD

Biography

Dr. Jennifer Liras is the Pharmacokinetics, Dynamics, and Metabolism Portfolio Lead at Pfizer, Inc.  She has more than 20 years of experience leading scientists responsible for characterizing and optimizing the pharmacokinetic properties of large and small molecule drugs.  She has a successful record of drug discovery and development across the portfolio in Cardiovascular Metabolic and Endocrine Diseases (CVMED), Antibacterials, Inflammation and Immunology, Neuroscience, Oncology and Rare Disease therapeutic areas.   She has dedicated her career to advancing predictive ADME sciences and most recently in tissue targeting, where she was instrumental in the development of predictive capabilities in brain penetration of efflux substrates.  Jenny received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1995 from The University of Texas at Austin and conducted her postdoctoral research in enzymology at Brandeis University.

Conferences

• Boston 2019

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.

Conferences

• Budapest 2018

MARIN José, PhD

Biography

Jose J. G. Marin obtained his BSc (Biology) in 1979 and his Ph.D. (Physiology) in 1983, both at the University of Granada (Spain). He continued his training in Liver Pathophysiology and Pharmacology at the INSERM/Beaujon Hospital in Paris and the Universities of Utah, Oxford, San Diego and Zurich for a total of more than four years. Since 1998 he is a Full Professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Salamanca (Spain). In the past, he was Head of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at this university for seven years, and at present, he has been appointed again for this position for the next four years. He is Funder and Head of the Laboratory of Experimental Hepatology and Drug Targeting (HEVEFARM) formed at present by 3 Full Professors, 1 Associate Professor, 4 Assistant Professors, 1 Laboratory Manager and 10 Ph.D. students. This group has been devoted to investigating different aspects regarding physiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology of the liver for more than 30 years. The HEVEFARM belongs to the Institute for Biomedical Research of Salamanca (IBSAL) and the National Center of Biomedical Research for the Study of Liver and Gastrointestinal Diseases (CIBERehd), National Health Institute Carlos III, Spain and has received the qualification of “Group of Excellence” by the Regional Government (Castilla & León, Spain). So far, he has supervised the education of >100 young scientists (41 Ph.D. Thesis plus >70 MSCs). His present interest is focused on the investigation of the liver and gastrointestinal cancer: early prediction of treatment failure and the development of pharmacological strategies to overcome chemoresistance. He has published >270 articles in books and journals (h index Scopus/Google 41/48). He has participated in the evaluation of proposals submitted to national (109) and international (80) agencies. He has reviewed >800 papers submitted to 222 different journals. He has got experience as Associate Editor (4 journals) and a member of Editorial Boards (20 journals).

Main Contributions:

1. Characterization of bile acid metabolism and transport across the liver and placenta under physiological circumstances and during cholestatic diseases.
2. Characterization of the role of the transportome in liver and gastrointestinal cancer chemoresistance
3. Development of strategies to overcome liver and gastrointestinal cancer chemoresistance either by:

• Using bile acid derivatives to obtain drugs targeted towards uptake transporters
• Using chemical agents to block drug export pumps
• Manipulation of the cancer transportome to enhance intracellular drug content.

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.

Conferences

• Budapest 2018
• Budapest 2014

MCFEELY Savannah, PhD

Biography

Dr. McFeely is a Research Scientist at University of Washington (UW) Drug Interaction Solutions. She obtained her PhD from the department of Pharmaceutics at the UW, working to evaluate the clinical significance and regulatory framework for the evaluation of organic anion transporting polypeptide 1B-based drug-drug interactions. Prior to her graduate studies she was a part of the DMPK department at Amgen working in clinical bioanalytical method development as well as metabolite identification. Currently she is working on research grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a knowledgebase of excipients and anti-infectives to advance the understanding of the DDI risk to patients in low income countries through PBPK modeling. 

Conferences

• Boston 2019

MCGEEHAN John K.

Biography

Mr. McGeehan joined Ascendance Biotechnology, Inc. (“Ascendance”) (formerly Hepregen Corporation (“Hepregen”)) in March, 2009. During Hepregen‘s start-up phase, Mr. McGeehan was responsible for successfully scaling-up the company’s micropatterned co-culture technology, which was exclusively licensed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”). In addition to being responsible for all operations and scientific groups at Ascendance, Mr. McGeehan is currently engaged in driving the commercialization of the Hepregen® line of application-directed assay kits and associated services worldwide. Mr. McGeehan has more than 25 years of technical and management experience in the biotechnology industry. He was a co-founder of ActiMed Laboratories, Inc. (“ActiMed”), a medical device company. As vice president of operations at ActiMed, Mr. McGeehan guided the development, scale-up, manufacture, and clinical trials, of the ENA•C•T® Total Cholesterol test. Prior to ActiMed, Mr. McGeehan was employed in positions of increasing responsibility at a division of E. Merck. At E. Merck, he managed the construction and start-up of a $1 million dry powder manufacturing facility. He leveraged the company’s fluid bed granulation technology into five distinct diagnostic reagent product lines, taking over 100 products to successful market introductions. Mr. McGeehan was also a founder of Innova Medical Technologies, Inc., providing general consulting and product development services to medical products companies. Mr. McGeehan holds a B.A. in biology from Millersville University and a M.S. in biomedical engineering from Drexel University. He is named as an inventor on seven US patents, including a key patent that provides tools essential to the routine, reproducible and economic manufacturing of the Hepregen line of high quality HepatoPac® and HepatoMune® products.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

MICHALEWICZ Meeghan, M.S.

Biography

Meeghan Michalewicz, M.S. is a Scientist III in the department of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in Ridgefield, CT. Meeghan received her B.S. degree in Forensic Science and Chemistry from the University of New Haven. She then earned her M.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Connecticut. At UConn Meeghan studied with Dr. José Manautou; her thesis project involved the identification of differentially expressed genes in a model of acetaminophen autoprotection. Meeghan previously presented her thesis work at a Northeast Society of Toxicology annual meeting, and has presented posters at various scientific meetings, including the Gordon Research Conference and multiple Society of Toxicology meetings. At Boehringer Ingelheim, Meeghan is responsible for the design and validation of drug transporter assays to support development projects. Her interests include new advances in the transporter field as well as enzyme and transporter interplay. She is a member of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS), and recently presented at a TRIUMPH seminar in Cambridge, MA.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

MITRA, Ashim K., PhD

Biography

Ashim K. Mitra received his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry in 1983 from the University of Kansas. He joined the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1994 as Chairman of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He is also Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Research, UM Curators’ Professor of Pharmacy, Co-Director, Vision Research Center UMKC School of Medicine. He has over 30 years of experience in the field of ocular drug delivery and disposition. He authored and co-authored over 300 refereed articles, 60 book chapters in the area of formulation development and ocular drug delivery, awarded 9 patents, and presented (along with his research group) well over 500 presentations/abstracts at national and international scientific meetings. This work has attracted over six million dollars in funding from government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DOD) and pharmaceutical companies. He served as Co-chair, of the USP Council of Experts, General Chapter <771> Ophthalmic Preparations Expert Panel U.S. Pharmacopeia. In 2007, he was named one of two recipients for the ARVO/Pfizer Ophthalmic Translational Research Award for excellence in the areas of research and fundamental scientific discoveries, including concepts and novel technologies, leading to clinical evidence of diagnosis, prevention, or amelioration of the pathological eye and/or an understanding of the normal vision processes. He is also the recipient of a numbers of research awards from NIH, AAPS, AACP, and numerous pharmaceutical organizations. In February 2014 he received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring from the University of Missouri-Kansas City He has served as a regular member of the National Institute of Health (NIH) Pharmacology & Toxicology Study Section and on the NIH Gene and Drug Delivery Study Section. He also serves on numerous scientific editorial boards. Dr. Mitra’s laboratory has been engaged in ocular drug delivery for nearly 30 years. Current efforts are directed to: (1) delineate mechanisms of transscleral permeation of both small and large molecules, (2) develop new strategies to deliver neuroprotective and antiproliferative agents from topical eye drops, (3) to design new biopolymers for long-term topical and subconjunctival administrations and finally, (4) delineate the expression of various transporters and receptor on the cornea, blood-retinal and blood aqueous barrier and utilize these cell absorptive mechanisms to deliver small and large molecule therapeutics.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2014

MULLIN, James, PhD

Biography

James Mullin is a Principal Scientist and Product Manager of MembranePlus™, an in silico tool to predict in vitro permeability & clearance mechanisms in different assays. James has 13 years of experience in computational modeling in the pharmaceutical industry, spending 10 years at Bend Research before joining Simulations Plus in 2014. In his most recent research, James developed models for active transport and metabolism in suspended, plated, and sandwich hepatocytes. In addition to the development of computational models, James also contributes to several FDA & EMA collaboration grants for Simulations Plus and trains scientists on the use of mechanistic modeling & simulation technology.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

NAKANISHI Takeo, PhD

Biography

Dr. Takeo Nakanishi has more than 20 years of experience in biopharmaceutics. He received his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences from Kanazawa University, and later had post-doc terms in Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, GA and Greenebaum Cancer Center, the University of Maryland at Baltimore, MD, USA. He currently appointed to a professor in Faculty of Pharmacy, Takasaki University of Health and Welfare. In his academic career, he has focused on 1) MDR transporters, in particular, ABCG2, in cancer cells, and 2) molecular biology of physiologically important transporters. For the past decade, he has been working in Kanazawa University to understand the pathophysiological significance of solute carriers for amino acids, urate, steroid hormones, and prostaglandins. Research on unappreciated roles of these carriers may hold much promise for new approaches in developing effective therapies for refractory diseases related to cancer and chronic inflammation.   

Conferences

• Seoul 2019

Nicole A. Kratochwil, PhD

Biography

Dr. Kratochwil is biologist by training and received her PhD degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Regensburg, Germany. After receiving an EC Marie Curie research training grant, she conducted her postdoctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, contributing to the European tumor targeting research framework by studying photoactivatable anti-cancer drugs. In 1999, she joined Roche Basel, Switzerland, starting her career in the Chemo/Bioinformatics group, followed by different positions in the preclinical DMPK & Safety department. During these years in pharmaceutical industry, she gained a deep knowledge in the process of drug research across multiple disciplines. Currently, her research focuses on the application of advanced, in vitro cellular models for human PK and DDI predictions using modeling & simulation techniques.

Webinars

• In Vitro PK Studies in a Long-Term Liver Model

NIGAM Sanjay, M.D.

Biography

Sanjay K. Nigam is the Nancy Kaehr Chair in Research and Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine (Nephrology) and Cellular Molecular Medicine at Univ. of California San Diego. He received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania. He conducted his postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller Univ. with Nobel laureate Gunter Blobel. He did his clinical Nephrology fellowship training at Columbia. Prior to moving to UCSD, he was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and served as Director of Renal Research at Brigham and Women's Hospital. His laboratory discovered the gene now known as OAT1 (originally NKT) as well as a number of other SLC22 transporters. His lab also first described the phenotypes of the OAT1, OAT3 and URAT1 knockout mice from a pharmacological, toxicological and physiological perspective. Extensive metabolomics analyses of these mice, as well as "omics" based metabolic reconstructions, led to the "Remote Sensing and Signaling Hypothesis" (Nature Rev. Drug Disc. 2015).

Conferences

• Boston 2015

Noémi Szili, PHD

Biography

Noémi Szili obtained her master’s degree in genetics and Cell biology at Université Paris Diderot in 2013. She obtained her PhD in microbiology from Bio Sorbonne Paris Cité specialized in Microbiology in 2017. During her time in Paris, she was involved in multiple research projects at the Pasteur Institute, including the study of bacterial ABC transporters. She started her professional career at SOLVO – a Charles River company in 2018 in a Scientific Business Development role and was promoted to Scientific Marketing Manager in 2021. She is responsible for most scientific marketing collateral in support of SOLVO’s portfolio. Serving as scientific liaison, she also works closely with the local commercial team, R&D group and management, and is a member of Charles River’s Discovery Advocates scientific advisory group. Noémi has published multiple research articles, is a co-author in the latest SOLVO Transporter book, and regularly hosts webinars and trainings

Webinars

• ICH M12 Draft Guidance on Drug Interaction Studies

OKUDAIRA Noriko, Ph.D.

Biography

Noriko Okudaira is a senior director in the Drug Metabolism & Pharmacokinetics Research Laboratories of Daiichi Sankyo Co., Ltd. Her current responsibilities are non-clinical ADME studies, PK/PD analysis of small molecules and DDI risk assessment. Her researchinterest is to integrate various in vitro and in vivo data to predict PK, efficacy and toxicity in human using M&S approach. She studied at the University of Tokyo and graduated with a master’s degree in 1985. She obtained Ph.D. degree in pharmaceutical science at the University of Tokyo in 2000. Before joining Daiichi Sankyo, she was employed by Nippon Roche (1985-1991) and Meiji Seika Kaisha (1992-2004).

Conferences

• Tokyo 2015

OSMAN-PONCHET Hanan, PhD.

Biography

Hanan Osman-Ponchet is currently a Metabolism Manager in the Department of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics at Galderma R&D in Sophia-Antipolis (France). Hanan has an MSc in Toxicology and Pharmacology and a PhD in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology obtained at the University of Burgundy in France. Dr. Osman-Ponchet has worked in drug development for over 15 years. She first joined the pharmaceutical industry in 2002, initially at Sanofi, Paris area, where she was a Manager of in vitro Drug Metabolism and Absorption. She joined Galderma R&D in 2007, and led the development of in vitro technologies to predict drug metabolism, drug absorption and drug-drug interactions in both hepatocytes and skin. Hanan has more than 15 years of experience in in vitro DMPK and has expertise in drug transporters (intestinal and cutaneous absorption), drug metabolism (liver and skin) and drug-drug interactions. Hanan’s research interests include in vitro methodologies for prediction of drug-drug interactions at metabolism and transporter levels and imaging techniques for assessment of drug distribution in the skin. Hanan has authored and coauthored more than 30 research publications and patents, and has given invited oral presentations at several different scientific conferences. Dr. Osman-Ponchet is an expert in the area of drug metabolism and drug transporters in human skin.

Conferences

• Budapest 2016

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.

Conferences

• Budapest 2018

PAINE Mary, RPh, PhD

Biography

Mary Paine, RPh, PhD is a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Washington State University. She received her BS in pharmacy at Oregon State University, her PhD in pharmaceutics at the University of Washington, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical pharmacology at the University of Michigan. Her longstanding research program, funded by the National Institutes of Health, focuses on adverse drug interactions precipitated by botanical and other natural products. Dr. Paine leads the Center of Excellence for Natural Product Drug Interaction Research, a multidisciplinary effort comprising clinical pharmacologists, natural products chemists, bioinformaticists, and health communications experts to provide leadership and guidance on the study and dissemination of these complex interactions. She has coauthored more than 95 publications as original research articles, reviews, editorials, and book chapters. She has served as associate editor for the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics and is currently serving her second term as associate editor for the journal Drug Metabolism and Disposition.

Webinars

• Natural Product-Drug Interactions: Case Studies from the NaPDI Center

PASTOR-ANGLADA, Marçal, PhD

Biography

Marçal Pastor-Anglada is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is also the PI of the Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics group within the Oncology Program of the National Biomedical Research Institute of Liver and Gastrointestinal Diseases (CIBER EHD). He has hold positions as an INSERM researcher at the CNRS Centre de Recherches sur l’Endocrinologie Moléculaire et le Developpement and as a Research Associate at the Department of Cellular, Molecular and Developmental Biology at the University of California Santa Barbara. He has been Visiting Associate Professor at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, Department of Oncology, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Visiting Professor at the Cellular and Molecular Physiology Laboratory at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the author of more than 150 indexed articles, mostly devoted to the study of membrane transporters. His current interests deal with the pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics associated with nucleoside-derived drug based therapies. His laboratory also studies the biology and pharmacology of nucleoside transporter (NT) proteins, with a particular focus on the SLC28 gene family encoding CNT plasma membrane drug carriers. Besides the analysis of their pharmacological profiles, work on the regulatory properties of these genes/proteins is a major issue in the laboratory. Overall all his projects show a great emphasis on translational research.

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

Paul Michalski, Ph.D

Biography

Paul Michalski, Ph.D. is an Investigator in the Systems Modeling and Translational Biology group at GlaxoSmithKline. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a post-doctoral position at Washington University in St. Louis studying the biophysics of cell motility. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling, where he studied the systems biology of learning and memory and developed novel computational approaches to study meso-scale systems such as membrane-receptor clusters. He was an Associate Computational Scientist at The Jackson Laboratory, where he used computational methods to study the three-dimensional structure of the human genome. He has been at GSK since 2017, where his primary focus is on quantitative systems toxicology (QST) models of hepatotoxicity

Webinars

• Using DILIsym to Predict Hepatotoxicity Risk During Pre-clinical Development

PIQUETTE-MILLER, Micheline, PhD

Biography

Dr. Micheline Piquette-Miller is a Professor within the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto. Dr. Piquette-Miller completed a pharmacy degree and PhD in Pharmacokinetics at the University of Alberta and continued post-doctoral training in the area of drug transporters at the University of California in San Francisco under the guidance of Dr. Giacomini. Dr. Piquette-Miller’s research is primarily focused on understanding the mechanisms involved in the pathophysiological regulation of drug transport proteins and how this impacts drug disposition. She has been the recipient of numerous prestigious national and international research awards. She has also held positions on the board of directors and executive councils of the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the Canadian Society of Pharmaceutical Science, the Canadian Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics and is an Associate Editor of the preeminent journal- Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2014

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. 

Webinars

• Application of sandwich-cultured hepatocytes and the B-Clear assay for the IVIVE of hepatic clearance, drug-drug interactions and unbound intracellular drug concentrations

Conferences

• Budapest 2018

POMOZI Viola, PhD

Biography

Viola Pomozi is a biologist, obtained her PhD in the field of molecular biology. She has been working at the Institute of Enzimology (Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest) in the research group of dr. András Váradi since 2005. From 2015 to 2018 she joined the laboratory of dr. Olivier Le Saux at John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii as a postdoctoral fellow. In both research groups they were focusing on an ABC trasporter protein, ABCC6. Mutations in this gene lead to pathological calcification in soft tissues. Using Abcc6 knockout mice they are investigating the molecular mechanisms of soft tissue calcification and are testing potential preventive treatments. Their recent findigs indicate that supplementing pyrophosphate, an endogenous calcification inhibitor, may be effective in the prevention of soft tissue calcification.

PONGRACZ Judit, Ph.D, DSc.

Biography

Prof Dr PONGRÁCZ, Judit Erzsébet received her BSc degree in Biochemistry, did her PhD in Immunology both at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, became drhabil in Medical Sciences at Pecs University, then in 2013 received the Academic Doctorate degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She spent 15 years in the United Kingdom working at the University of Birmingham first as a post-doc, then as a senior research scientist. Currently, she is a full professor at Pecs University, heads the Department of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, director of the Biotechnology MSc Programme at the University of Pecs, and chief scientific officer of Humeltis Ltd, the University’s spin-off company based on Prof Pongracz’s granted patents in lung tissue engineering. Her research interests include: Molecular microenvironment of non-small cell lung cancers, side effects of cancer drugs, drug transporter activities within the lung, angiogenesis in pulmonary senescence and lung cancer, molecular background of COPD and the regulation of pulmonary aging mechanisms. She also works on modelling most pulmonary diseases in vitro. She’s holder of several national and international grants both in research and education. At Humeltis she is responsible for novel pulmonary tissue product development, toxicology and efficacy testing of drug candidates in pulmonary tissues and development of personalized applications for lung cancer treatment. She was honoured by the Women in Science Foundation in 2014 with the Excellence Award in Biotechnology; received the Szentagothai Experienced Scientist Award, within the National Excellence Programme, in 2013, won I-st prize for Innovation, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Baranya County Industrial Board, in 2013 and was honorary senior lecturer and scientist at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK since 2008. In 2009 Prof Pongrácz co-authored and co-edited the award winning book of “Medical Biotechnology” commended by The British Medical Association in the Medical Book Competition Awards.

Conferences

• Boston 2015

PRASAD, Bhagwat, PhD

Biography

Before joining as an assistant professor at University of Washington, Dr. Prasad worked as a postdoc fellow and a lead scientist of UW Research Affiliate Program on Transporters (UWRAPT). Dr. Prasad obtained M.S. (Pharm) in 2006 and Ph.D. in 2010 in Pharmaceutical Sciences from NIPER, Mohali, India. Dr. Prasad has published 55 peer-reviewed international papers and >70 conference abstracts and delivered >30 invited talks. Dr. Prasad also worked in Drug discovery division of Ranbaxy Research laboratories in India.

Webinars

• Proteomics-informed Modeling Reveals Glucuronidation as a Transport Mechanism for Drugs and Endobiotics
• The Promises of Quantitative Transporter Proteomics: IVIVE to Precision Medicine

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

Prof. KUNJI Edmund, PhD

Biography

Edmund Kunji studied Physics, Mathematics, Biology and Chemistry at the University of Groningen and Visual Arts at the Art Academy Minerva, Groningen, The Netherlands. He obtained an MSc in Biology in 1990 and an MSc in Chemistry in 1991. He carried out his postgraduate studies at the Department of Molecular Microbiology, University of Groningen under the supervision of Profs. Konings and Poolman, and in 1997 obtained his PhD in Mathematics and Natural Sciences with the distinction Cum Laude. From 1996 – 2000 he was an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Dr Richard Henderson at Medical Research Council, Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. In 2000 he was appointed Research Group Leader at the Medical Research Council Mitochondrial Biology Unit by Prof. Sir John Walker. In 2003 he received the Young Investigators Award of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and in 2005 he was elected Staff Fellow and Director of Studies of Trinity Hall. In 2019 he became Professor of Biophysics at the University of Cambridge. He works with his group on transport processes in mitochondria, which are important in human physiology and disease.

Webinars

• The SLC25 Carrier Family: Important Transport Proteins in Mitochondrial Physiology and Pathology

RAGUENEAU-MAJLESSI Isabelle, MD, MS

Biography

Dr. Ragueneau is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy, at the University of Washington (UW) and the Director of the Drug Interaction Database program. She received her medical degree from St Antoine University in Paris, France, and specialized in Clinical Pharmacology. Prior to moving to the US, Dr. Ragueneau designed and supervised clinical studies in the private sector and in academia for over 6 years. She started working at the UW in 1999, as a Research Associate, then Principal Research Scientist and Project Manager for the Drug Interaction Database. In November 2009, Dr. Ragueneau joined the faculty of the Department of Pharmaceutics as Clinical Associate Professor and was promoted to full Professor in 2014. Dr. Ragueneau has published in the areas of drug-drug interactions (DDIs), drug disposition and clinical pharmacology. She is interested in the regulatory framework of DDI assessment and the clinical relevance of drug interactions. Dr. Ragueneau graduated from the UW’s Master’s Degree Program in Biomedical Regulatory Affairs in 2010. In 2015, she was named a UW CoMotion Presidential Innovation Fellow.

RAY, Adrian S., PhD

Biography

Dr. Adrian Ray is Senior Director Clinical Research at Gilead Sciences, Inc. where he has been a researcher for over 14 years. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California Santa Cruz and Ph.D. from Yale University. His accomplishments include over 80 peer-reviewed publications, serving as a primary responder at 3 FDA advisory committee meetings, and being the recipient of the 2014 William H. Prusoff award presented by the International Society for Antiviral Research. Adrian’s work has included assessing the potential for transporter mediated drug-drug interactions, characterizing the interplay between efflux transport and esterase metabolism during intestinal absorption, and assessing the coordinated activity of apical and basolateral transporters during renal active tubular secretion.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017
• San Francisco 2014

REBOUL Emmanuelle, PhD

Biography

Dr. Emmanuelle Reboul received an Engineer diploma in Nutrition and Food Sciences from Agrosup Dijon, France in 2002. During her master degree and PhD thesis in the INSERM* laboratory “Human Nutrition and Lipids” in Marseille, France, 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.

Back to Marseille, France since the end of 2008 in 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 the first one in the Word 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 PhD award of the French Lipidomic Group (2007), the Price of the French Academia of Medicine (2007), the Pepsico International Travel Price (2009), and the Research Prices of the French Nutrition Society (2010 and 2015).

Webinars

• New Insights on Fat-Soluble Vitamin Efflux by the Intestine

Conferences

• Budapest 2018

REMALEY, Alan, PhD

Biography

Alan T. Remaley, M.D., Ph.D., is currently the section chief of the Lipoprotein Metabolism Laboratory in the Cardiopulmonary Branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, MD. He is also a senior staff member of the Department of Laboratory Medicine at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Dr. Remaley received his B.S. in Biochemistry and Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. He received in 1987 a M.D. and Ph.D. (Biochemistry) degree from the University of Pittsburgh and completed in 1990 a residency in Clinical Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania. He did a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Bryan Brewer at NHLBI from 1990-1995. He has published over 200 papers in the field of lipoprotein metabolism and cardiovascular disease and is an inventor on several patents related to new therapeutic agents and diagnostic tests for cardiovascular disease. He has made important contributions to the field of HDL metabolism, particularly related to the mechanism of the ABCA1 transporter and has developed several apolipoprotein mimetic peptides, which are in pre-clinical stage development by biotechnology companies. He has also made fundamental discoveries related to the role of Lecithin:Cholesterol Acyltransferase (LCAT) in HDL metabolism and human disease and has developed recombinant LCAT as a potential therapy for Familial LCAT Deficiency and Acute Coronary Syndrome, which are in early stage clinical trials.

Conferences

• San Francisco 2017

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.

Conferences

• Budapest 2018

RODRIGUES David, PhD

Biography

David has been in the pharmaceutical industry for 32 years and currently holds the title of Senior Scientific Director as head of the Transporter Sciences Group at Pfizer (Groton, CT, USA).  Before joining Pfizer in 2014, he spent productive periods at other US-based pharmaceutical companies (Searle, Abbott Labs, Merck, and Bristol-Myers Squibb).  During that time, he served on both scientific and managerial ladders.  He has authored 179 peer-reviewed manuscripts, presented >85 seminars/talks/webinars, and in the past served on the editorial boards of various DMPK-related journals (Xenobiotica, Drug Metabolism & Disposition, Current Drug Metabolism). In addition, he has edited/co-edited four DMPK-related textbooks.  Presently, he serves as adjunct professor at the College of Pharmacy, University of Rhode Island, and is a member of the International Transporter Consortium (ITC). In 2009, David was inducted as Fellow of The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS).  He is the recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Accomplishments in Drug Discovery & Development Award bestowed by the International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics (ISSX).

Webinars

• Assessing Drug Interactions Using Solute Carrier (SLC) Biomarkers: A Report from the Front Line
• Sulfate Conjugates as Solute Carrier Transporter Substrates; Probes, Biomarkers, and Utility?

Conferences

• Boston 2019

RONALDSON Patrick T., PhD

Biography

Dr. Patrick Ronaldson is an Associate Professor of Pharmacology in the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Dr. Ronaldson’s research is focused on studying blood-brain barrier (BBB) physiology and pharmacology with an emphasis on the challenges of effectively delivering drugs to the brain in disease states. His research continues to develop “state of the art” methods/procedures/tools/models for the in vivo examination of BBB/neurovascular unit (NVU) integrity, regulation of endothelial “barrier” properties at the molecular level, and how pharmacology of drug transport proteins is altered by stroke, neurodegenerative diseases or acute/chronic pain. Dr. Ronaldson has over 40 peer-reviewed publications and 5 book chapters on BBB physiology and transporter pharmacology. Additionally, he is the past chair of the Drug Transporter Community of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS), the chair-elect of the Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics and Drug Metabolism (PPDM) Community of AAPS, and the chair of the Drug Discovery for the Nervous System (DDNS) Study Section of the National Institutes of Health.

Conferences

• Boston 2019

SAHI Jasminder, PhD

Biography

Jasminder Sahi obtained a Ph.D. degree (Pharmacognosy, 1991) from Panjab University, India and then participated in a post-doctoral program in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Illinois at Chicago.  She started her career in the Pharmaceutical Industry in the Department of Pharmacokinetics and Drug Metabolism (Parke Davis R&D), which was subsequently acquired by Pfizer Global Research and Development.  In 2006, she joined a new venture (CellzDirect) as the Vice President R&D.  In 2012 she moved to Shanghai China, as Head of DMPK for GlaxoSmithKline Research and Development and in 2015 made the transition to Sanofi R&D leading the DMPK efforts in the Asia Pacific region.   Jasminder’s research focus is on transporters and induction of drug metabolizing enzymes, using primary hepatocytes. While her initial forays into transporter research involved ion transport to understand CFTR, at Pfizer she changed her focus to xenobiotic transporters, with the goal of improving drug disposition, delivery and safety.   She has worked extensively with hepatic and renal transporters as well as the blood-brain-barrier.  She is an elected member of the ISSX council, a reviewer for six journals and has authored over 40 peer-reviewed publications. 

Conferences

• Seoul 2019
• Tokyo 2017

SAHI, Jasminder, PhD

Biography

Jasminder Sahi obtained a Ph.D. degree in Pharmacognosy from Panjab University, India in 1991 and then participated in a post-doctoral program in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.  She has worked for four major pharmaceutical companies, starting her career in in the Department of Pharmacokinetics and Drug Metabolism at Parke Davis R&D, which was subsequently acquired by Pfizer Global Research and Development.  In 2012 she moved to Shanghai China from the USA, as Head of DMPK for GlaxoSmithKline R&D and in 2015 made the transition to Sanofi R&D, leading the DMPK, Toxicology and Animal Research efforts in the Asia Pacific region.   Jasminder’s research focus is on transporters and induction of drug metabolizing enzymes, using primary hepatocytes. While her initial forays into transporter research in academia involved ion transport to understand CFTR, at Pfizer she changed her focus to xenobiotic transporters, with the goal of improving drug disposition, delivery and safety.   She has worked extensively with hepatic and renal transporters as well as the blood-brain-barrier.  She is an elected member of the ISSX council, a reviewer for six journals and has authored over 40 peer-reviewed publications. 

Conferences

• Budapest 2014

SAKATA, Takeshi

Biography

Takeshi Sakata graduated Toho university Department of Biology in 1989 and received PhD degree from Kyorin University School of Medicine in 2004.  He worked for a Japanese CRO company, Fuji Biomedix as a researcher and study director of the mutagenesis studies from 1989 to 2002, also as a researcher of development of transporter assay systems and a diagnosis system for cancer using an amino acid transporter until 2009.

After short experience of sales activity, he went to the UK to study at Bangor University Business School, and received MBA in 2011.

Since 2012, he has been dealing with Japanese customers as Business Development Manager and Account Manager at SOLVO Biotechnology Inc.

Conferences

• Tokyo 2017

SALPHATI Laurent, PhD

Biography

Dr. Laurent Salphati is currently a Principal Scientist in the Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics department at
Genentech, Inc. He heads the Permeability/Drug Transporters group and has been supporting and leading immunology
and oncology project teams from preclinical discovery to late stage clinical development. He received his Pharm.D.
from the University of Paris XI, France, and conducted his Ph.D research, investigating the complementary roles of
P-glycoprotein and CYP3A in drug absorption and disposition, at the University of California, San Francisco under
the guidance of Dr. Leslie Z. Benet. His research interests include the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of
drugs (PK/PD and PB/PK modeling) and the roles of drug transporters in drug absorption and disposition.

Conferences

• Boston 2019
• San Francisco 2017
• Budapest 2016
• San Francisco 2014

SARKADI Balazs, PhD, MD

Biography

Balázs Sarkadi, MD, Ph.D., spent several years as a post-doc and then as a visiting scientist at major universities in the United States and Canada. He is research professor at Semmelweis University, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, past president of FEBS, member of several international research societies including the Academia Europeae. His research has been focusing on membrane proteins, including the investigation of ABC membrane transporters, which play a major role in the multidrug resistance of cancer, in general pharmacology, and in stem cell function. His recent work is related to transporter regulation in cancer cells and stem cells. He has published more than 300 papers in international scientific journals, with a citation number over 13,400 (in WoS, or 18,500 in Google Scholar) and an h-index of 61 (GS 69). He has several international patents already in commercial applications.

Webinars

• Drug Transporters in Human Stem Cells

Conferences

• Budapest 2016
• Budapest 2014