Rod was born and brought up in Paisley, Scotland and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1981 with a 1st Class Honors degree in Chemistry and completed his PhD with Professor Charles Rees at Imperial College, London in 1984. He was awarded a NATO Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and spent two years with Professor Clark Still at Columbia University , NY working in the area of molecular recognition.

Rod joined Pfizer in Sandwich in 1986 as a Research Scientist and worked in many medicinal chemistry programs in the cardiovascular, GI, Sexual Health, Urology and Allergy & Respiratory Therapeutic Areas. Rod is the co-inventor of darifenacin (EnablexTM).

Rod was appointed as Vice President, Head of Discovery Chemistry in 2000. In May 2001, he relocated to the USA to take up a new post as Vice President, Discovery Technology Center in Cambridge , MA . In November 2003, Rod relocated again, to take up a position as Vice President, Discovery Research, PGRD Michigan and in 2006, was appointed to Senior Vice President, Drug Safety R&D and Comparative Medicine. Most recently in February 2007, Rod was promoted to Senior Vice President, Head of Worldwide Research.

Michael is a dynamic consulting executive with more than eleven years of experience assisting organizations improve business performance by leading the development and deployment of new strategies, processes, and technology. He has global experience in the consulting, pharmaceutical planning and financial services industries. His area of expertise has been assisting firms to achieve transformational change through operations improvement.

Michael is the US Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences R&D Advisory Services Leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ and is based in New York City. He is primarily focused on integrated operations and business planning, project management, and organization development. His areas of specialization include: seniormanagement decision support, demand management, portfolio visualization, operational planning and operational strategy development, organization design, process improvement/reengineering. He has developed both strategic and tactical programs to help organizations define and implement desired changes, as well as foster the leadership skills needed for the new environment.

Prior to joining PwC, he was the founder and president of Intendere Consulting, a specialized consultancy established to develop and execute practical integrated operations and business planning strategies for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. While at Intendere, Michael led projects for both large- and mediumsize pharmaceutical organizations, helping them achieve greater efficiency through the development of operations planning organizations, systems, processes and tools. Earlier in his career he was a management consultant in the Life Science Strategy practice at Deloitte Consulting based in New York City.

Currently, Michael is leading a global R&D transformation effort for a multi-national pharmaceutical organization based in Manchester UK with the design, development and implementation of a global R&D operational planning operating model and organization unit. Throughout the past few years Michael has led:

• The design and development of an operational planning operating model and cross-functional organization strategy for a biopharmaceutical research company based in San Francisco
• An executive assessment and review of R&D operations planning for a biopharmaceutical company based in Pennsylvania.
• The design and development of a global complaint management operating model and organizations structure for a major device and generics manufacturer based in Illinois
• The global operational planning strategy development for a major biopharmaceutical firm based in Massachusetts.
• The design of a regulatory operating model/business process and FDA communication strategy for a multi-national pharmaceutical organization based in Paris.
• The design, development and implementation of an operational planning operating model and organization unit for the global operations function of a multinational pharmaceutical organization based in New Jersey.

Michael holds a B.S. in Industrial / Organizational Psychology and a B.S. in Biology from Brooklyn College and a M.A. in Organization Psychology from Columbia University. He is an adjunct faculty member at Seton Hall's Business School, Stillman School, teaching Organization Behavior and Leadership. Michael is also a
program committee member of the DIA.

• Studied physics, PhD in biochemistry (EMBL-European Molecular Biology Laboratory Hamburg & Humboldt University Berlin, Germany)
• Post doc at Biocentre, University of Basel in structural biology
• At Roche since 1995, started as X-ray crystallography lab head
• Head of Molecular Structure Research , 2001
• Head of Discovery Technologies Basel , 2008

„Screening Technologies and Structure Based Design“

• Diversity of screening technologies for hit generation
• X-ray structures and biophysical methods for HTS hit profiling
• Fragment screening process, technologies and examples
• Structure based design to facilitate lead generation and optimization

I am with Bayer HealthCare for more than 10 years, working as a Medicinal Chemist in Pharma Research. Lab Head, currently heading a research group in oncology research - beside my activities in our research informatics project, called Pharmacophore Informatics Project, where my responibilities ly in the area of data visualization and analysis.

I started as a quantum chemist working on methods to treat large systems. I worked with Jules Moskowitz at NYU, Mark Ratner at Northwestern University and John Pople (Nobe Laureate) at Carnegie-Mellon University . My first position was on the faculty of the Pharmacology Department at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where there was a focus on molecular pharmacology dealing with the CNS, particularly for GPCR targets, including histamine and serotonin receptors.

I then took an industry position at Berlex, which was mainly interested in cardiovascular drugs. I started a computational group there, working mostly on ligand-based drug design. A few years later I moved to Sandoz, which later became Novartis. Much of the emphasis of the work there was on targets where X-ray structures of the targets, or of close homologs, were available.

This allowed for the greatest impact on ongoing projects through the use of Structure Based Drug Design approaches. I recently took a position at Lundbeck Research , USA , which focuses on CNS therapeutics.

Dr. Magdalena Tary-Lehmann is a Co-Founding Scientist and Chief Scientific Officer for Cellular Technology Limited.  Dr. Tary-Lehmann received her M.D. in 1988 and her Ph.D. in Immunology in 1993, both from the University of Tübingen, Germany.  Her postdoctoral training in Immunology was at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 1989-1993.

She subsequently moved in 1993 to Case Western Reserve University, and in 2003 was awarded tenure and appointed to Associate Professor in their Department of Pathology.  In her current capacity as Chief Scientific Officer, she provides guidance and oversight for technical operations and for ensuring the scientific excellence of the company.

Over the past ten years, she has worked with both clients and regulatory agencies to develop and validate reference samples and controls for use in regulated immune monitoring assays.

Stefan was born and brought up in Frankfurt/Main, Germany and graduated from the Johan-Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt in 1994 with a first-class diploma degree in Biochemistry. He completed his Ph.D. thesis with Professor Heinz Ruterjans at the Biophysical Institute of the University in Frankfurt in 1998 with the main focus on NMR studies of recombinant proteins.

The same year he joined AstraZeneca in Mölndal/Sweden as a Senior Research Scientist in the Protein Engineering group and was one of the key individuals that helped to establish the emerging Structural Chemistry Laboratory as a center of excellence. In 2003 he was promoted to the position of Associate Principal Scientist and in 2006 to the position of Principal Scientist. Throughout the years he had different roles in the organisation. In his role as a team leader he was managing a protein engineering team aiming to support structural studies (X-ray/NMR) with high-quality protein reagents. Furthermore he was appointed Delivery leader to ensure the timely delivery and optimal exploitation of structural data for lead generation.

Originally trained as a biochemist he constantly developed his skills and increased his broad scientific expertise in Molecular Biology, Fermentation, Protein Engineering, NMR as well as in a wide range of different biophysical characterization techniques, a combination that has given him the ability to actively influence numerous Discovery projects at different stages across the company. His current focus is on the effective exploitation of label-free technologies during the lead generation and optimisation process by assessing kinetic and thermodynamic parameters of ligand binding and linking those to 3D-structural data.

Hans (Johann) Winkler is senior director at Ortho Biotech Oncology Research & Development leading Oncology Biomarker Discovery and Development globally. Hans originally joined the J&JPRD Drug Discovery team in Beerse in 2003 as the head of Functional Genomics, a newly created department combining genomic technologies and bioinformatics. Before joining J&JPRD, he was Director and Global Program Manager for Target Validation Technologies at AstraZeneca, plc in Manchester , UK , with responsibility for target validation technology assessment and acquisition across all disease areas globally.

He held positions of increasing responsibility at Zeneca, including team leader in Target Discovery, working mainly in the cardiovascular area, and senior group leader and associate director responsible for TI/TV activities and technology assessment and acquisition across several disease areas. Prior to this, he was a scientist and instructor at Harvard Medical School's Deaconess Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital) in Boston, where he worked on endothelial cell biology and immunobiology in a xenotransplantation context, after work as a scientist and group leader at the Vienna International Research Cooperation Center in Vienna (Novartis Research Institute) working on gene regulation in endothelial cells.

Hans was born in Austria , where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied Biochemistry at the University of Vienna after which he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to attend graduate school in the U.S. where he obtained a Master's degree in Molecular Biology (working on Caenorrhabditis elegans) from the University of Houston in 1986. Hans then returned to Vienna to work on his PhD thesis. He completed his postdoctoral work at the Institute for Molecular Pathology.

Hans is co-author of some forty original, peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and inventor on two patents.

Doctor Marc Laruelle received his Medical Degree from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels , Belgium in 1982. Following completion of the Belgian Neuropsychiatry Residency program, he completed a fellowship (1990-1991) at the Clinical Brain Disorder Branch at NIMH, Bethesda , under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Weinberger. From 1991 to 1996, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University, working with Drs Robert Innis and Dennis Charney. In 1996, he accepted a position of Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Radiology at Columbia University, where is became Director of the Division of Functional Brain Mapping. In 2005, he was appointed Professor of Psychiatry and Radiology at Columbia University and became Director of the Conte Center for the study of schizophrenia at Columbia University. In 2006, he moved to GlaxoSmithKline in London , as Vice-President for Clinical Molecular Imaging and was appointed Professor of Psychiatry, Imperial College , London . In 2008, he became Head of the schizophrenia and cognitive disorders discovery performance unit at GSK.

Dr. Laruelle main academic interest is to develop molecular brain imaging techniques with Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and to apply these techniques to understand the role of neurotransmitter imbalances in the pathophysiology and treatment of psychiatric conditions. Using new imaging modalities, he was the first to document that schizophrenia is associated with dysfunction of dopaminergic function that are predictive to response to treatment. His work was recognized by the Paul Janssen Award for Schizophrenia Research from the CINP in 1996 and the International Joel Elkes Award of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) in 2004.

Dr. Laruelle is regarded as one of the main expert in molecular imaging and in psychiatric clinical research and pharmacology. Besides schizophrenia, he made important contributions to the understanding of substance abuse. While in Academia, he was recipient of a large number of research grants from the NIH and had a long track record of collaboration with the Pharmaceutical Industry. He authored or co-authored more than 150 papers and book chapters on brain imaging and schizophrenia pathophysiology. His current role at GSK is to head the development of novel medications for schizophrenia and other cognitive disorders.

Lutz Jermutus is MedImmune's senior director of technology in Cambridge , UK . In this role, he is responsible for managing and leading next-generation biologics technologies through in-house research and strategic collaborations. Previously, Dr. Jermutus served as director of discovery, oncology, and as director of protein engineering.

Dr. Jermutus earned his doctorate at the University of Zurich ( Switzerland ) in biochemistry. He majored in biotechnology at Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnologie de Strasbourg ( France ) . He was a Kekulé-Fellow of the German Chemical Industry Association, a recipient of a fellowship at the German National Academic Foundation and holds a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Karlsruhe ( Germany ).

Dr. Jermutus has published more than 25 peer-reviewed papers since 1998 and is an inventor on numerous product and technology patents.

 

Dr Steve Pettifer is a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at The University of Manchester. With a background in high performance computer graphics and distributed systems, his interests include the development of user-friendly visualisation tools for the life sciences.

 

Current Position
Reader in Text Mining, University of Manchester
Director of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM)

Education
PhD Computational Linguistics, UMIST
DEA, Linguistics, Paris VII, Jussieu , France
DEA, Literature, Paris IV, Sorbonne , France
BA, Language and Linguistics, University of Athens , Greece

Employment history
Research Associate, University of Geneva , Machine Translation (1983-1984)
Research Assistant, Department of Computational Linguistics, UMIST (1985-1993)
Research Fellow, Language and Engineering, UMIST (1999-2000)
Senior Lecturer, Computing, Manchester Metropolitan University (1993-1999)
Senior Lecturer, Computer Science, School of Computing Science and Engineering, University of Salford (2000-2005)

Profile to follow Dr. Brown received his Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh and did post doctoral studies in simulations on biological systems at the University of California, San Francisco. He currently serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hills School of Pharmacy -- Division of Medicinal Chemistry where he lectures on Molecular Modeling and Drug Design.

Dr. Brown is a recognized industry expert having published over 50 peer-reviewed papers, delivered over 40 invited lectures, and is the named holder of two patents. He has been actively involved with a number of both scientific journals and professional magazines and has served on a number of associated editorial boards. Additionally, Dr. Brown has sat on the funding committee for the National Institute of Health and is the past Chair of American Chemical Societys Computers in Chemistry. 

Profile to follow

Harsukh completed his medical training at Aberdeen University  and post-graduate  clinical, academic  and research training in general internal medicine, immunology, respiratory medicine and oncology  at various teaching  hospitals in London including  St Bartholomew, Westminster  & Charing Cross Hospitals, London (Imperial Medical School, one of the top 3 biomedical institutions in the world).  

He joined Pfizer Central Research in 1994 in the Dept of Experimental Medicine as Clinical Project Manager/Associate Director  and worked on various anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, cardiovascular and oncology projects. Later he joined Roche Global Drug Development as Global Clinical Science Leader,  Director of Oncology and worked on various projects in oncology, virology, asthma and allergy.  Since 1998 he has been Director, Global Experimental Medicine, R & D Charnwood and in 2003 took on the additional role of Director, Global Discovery Medicine, Respiratory  & Inflammation Therapeutic Area and has had responsibility within his department for various projects in  Cardiovascular, Respiratory (Asthma, Rhinitis, COPD) and Inflammation (Rheumatoid arthritis, Osteoarthritis, Transplantation and Psoriasis).  

He chairs and leads the cross-functional Discovery Medicine Leadership Team (DMLT), comprising of department heads for Bioscience, Translational Science, Bioanalysis, Molecular Science & Biomics, Imaging, Safety Assessment, Clinical Pharmacology, Experimental Medicine and Clinical Sciences spread across 3 R & D sites, that spans both discovery and development functions.   Recently he has been appointed the Global Head of Early Development, Respiratory  & Inflammation Therapeutic Area

He has also served on the AZ, Human Exposure Limits Committee (HELC), which oversees all compounds that enter FTIM. He has published extensively (> 100 publications) and has been an invited keynote speaker at more than 100 international conferences and is cited in the Marquis Who Who for “demonstrating outstanding achievement” and “contributing significantly to the betterment of contemporary society”.

Justin Bryans is currently Director of the Medical Research Council Technology’s (MRCT) Drug Discovery Group based in Mill Hill, North London. He trained as a chemist at the Universities of York and Oxford, the latter being as a post-doc under Professor Sir Jack Baldwin. Since then he has gained over 17 year’s experience as a medicinal chemist in a number of biotechnology and pharma companies, most recently at Pfizer.

He has led projects across a wide range of therapeutic areas, including pain, anxiety, sleep disorders, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, identifying ten clinical candidates and filing over 50 patents in the process. His current role at MRCT involves capitalising on World-class MRC biology, adding value via developing lead compounds, clinical candidates and antibodies, and partnering these with biotechnology and pharma companies to treat diseases of high unmet need.

Profile to follow

Profile to follow

Introduction
Laleh joined Frost & Sullivan, London, in October 2007 as a research analyst within the drug discovery team for the European healthcare practice. Her role involves working with clients to help identify key market challenges, issues and opportunities that affect their businesses.

Project experience
Laleh has worked on research services that have focussed on the • Cell-Based Assay Market in Europe • Overview of Drug Discovery-Eastern and Western Europe Consulting Experience • Assessment of the European Markets for Infusion & Irrigation Solutions Prioritisation of Market Opportunities

Competencies
Laleh's main focus areas include analysing the drug discovery market in terms of market analysis, technology analysis, strategy development, business relationship development and project writing.

Previous work & Education
Laleh holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Imperial College London, UK. Her research area focussed on the surface modification and characterisation of polymer constructs for tissue engineering applications and was awarded the 2007 Dudley Newitt Prize for experimental excellence and presentation. Her thesis included reviewed journal publications and several presentations at international conferences. During her research studies she also gained extensive experience teaching biotechnology, pilot plant studies and bioreactors to undergraduate students in chemical engineering, In addition to her Ph.D. Laleh also holds a 1st class BEng. (Hons) in Biochemical Engineering from University College London, UK. Prior to joining Frost & Sullivan, Laleh worked in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London, UK, as a Post Doctorate in nanotube polymer composites for aerospace and tissue engineering applications. Previous to an academic career, Laleh has extensive experience in the healthcare sector, working for the Central Middlesex Hospital, London, UK and in the R&D sector at Serono, a global biotechnology company in Geneva, Switzerland.

Jurgen Borlak was a Cancer Research Campaign-founded postdoctoral research scientist and in 1990 joined the Marion Merrel Dow Research Institute in Strasbourg, France, as principal investigator. In 1998, he was appointed Director of the Center of Drug Research and Molecular Pharmacology at the Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine; the centre focuses largely on the molecular effects of drugs and xenobiotics, using a wide range of methods and technologies in cell biology, genomics and molecular biology.

In 2000 Jurgen Borlak was habilitated in pharmacology and toxicology and received the venia legendi at the Medical School of Hannover. In 2002 he was appointed as full professor to the chair of Pharmaco- and Toxicogenomics at the Medical School of Hannover. He was also appointed as Professor of Molecular Anatomy at the Medical Faculty of the University Leipzig in 2003. Jurgen Borlak is author of 157 original publications and 25 book chapters. He is reviewer and member of the editorial board for various scientific journals. Amongst others he is member of the of the Council on Basic Cardiovascular Sciences and an appointed expert of the World Health Organisation.

Profile to follow

Cédric has hold several positions in the pharmaceutical industry at Sanofi and Merck Serono. He participated to, then was responsible for developing the company's research knowledge space (corporate database and ELNs). He had tremendous impacts in implementing innovative solutions for integrating internal and external information as well as developing predictive tools related to drug-likeness, ADME, virtual screening, and in silico toxicology. Cédric has 10 years experience in the development of databases and computational methods in the pharma-industry.

Dr. Doukas received a Ph.D. from Boston University, where his thesis addressed the connection between vascular permeability and leukocyte diapedesis. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School examining immune functions of the vascular endothelium (under the direction of Dr. Jordan Pober), he moved to faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where his laboratory investigated topics related to endothelial cells and autoimmune inflammation. After positions at Prizm Pharmaceuticals and Selective Genetics, where he contributed to programs that sought to develop growth factor proteins and gene vectors for indications such as wound repair and myocardial ischemia, he joined TargeGen to establish the Cardiovascular Program and where he now guides the development of novel therapeutics for treatment of ischemic diseases.

Dr. Karol Kozak is currently working as data handling expert at LMC-RISC, ETH Zurich. He has been influential in the development of data mining tolls for High Throughput, High Content Screening (HCS) over the last few years at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biological and Genetic in Dresden (Germany).

He plays a leading Role in defining the strategy and standards for management of large scale data produced in HCS technology. During his PhD time Karol Kozak became an expert in statistical pattern recognition applied to large scale screening data. He performed various data managment and data mining projects at Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology and at ETH Zurich.

 

Shankar Sellappan, Ph.D. is an Industry Analyst with the Frost & Sullivan North American Healthcare Practise. He focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies and market dynamics in Drug Discovery Technologies industry in North America.

Since joining Frost & Sullivan in February 2006, Dr. Selappan has completed several studies, including analysis of the U.S. Life Science Mass Spectrometry, U.S qRT-PCr markets, and U.S. Protein Electrophoresis market. As as a former scientist, his market analyses are written from an end-user perspective, with applications playing a prominent role in the development of market revenue forecast.

Prior to joining Frost & sulivan, Dr. Selleppan was a graduate student at University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cencer Center. He brings significant practical expirience in the use of life science reseach technologies, which he acquired in a variety of medical research disciplines at the UTMDACC and Schools of Medicine of Johns Hopkins University and Case Western Reserve University.

Bringing in-vitro screening for HTS, Hit Optimisation and Lead Optimisation together: The introduction of a new integrated infrastructure at Organon’s research laboratories.
In order to make Lead Discovery activities more efficient, Organon invested Euro 8M in lab automation for HTS and follow-up testing. A flexible island based approach was implemented that ranges from fully automated systems to smaller workstations.

This project made lab automation available to a large group of scientists who do not have detailed automation expertise so user-friendliness of both hardware and software was a key factor in the design. This presentation will discuss how in-vitro screening is organized, how business processes are improved through standardization and how users and the company benefit from the new infrastructure.

Biography
Dr. Steven van Helden studied Chemistry and obtained his PhD in Pharmacy in 1992. He joined the molecular modeling group of Organon (Oss, The Netherlands) to work on a number of drug discovery projects. Later he was responsible for setting up procedures for compound selection & acquisition for High Throughput Screening at the research site in Newhouse, Scotland. After returning to Oss in 2000, he chaired a project to implement and introduce chemoinformatics webpages for the chemists at Organon. In 2003, Steven was appointed Director HTS and Technologies in the department of Molecular Pharmacology in Oss. In this capacity he was responsible for the project to implement new HTS robots and labautomation for a wide range of scientists in the Molecular Pharmacology labs in both Oss and Newhouse.