MEEX Speaker
BOURNER Maureen, Ph.D.
Principal Scientist ADME/Tox Sigma-Aldrich St. Louis, MO, USA
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.
