Predictive Toxicology – From Vision to Reality

Friedlieb Pfannkuch graduated as a physician from the Free University of Berlin, Germany and is Professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He has more than 27 years of experience in non-clinical safety assessment for all phases of drug development. During his career he was head of experimental toxicology at Ciba-Geigy in Basel, head of the non-clinical safety section at Yamanouchi Europe in the Netherlands, responsible for non-clinical nutrition safety at Roche Vitamins, and from 2003 until his retirement in 2011 he was a senior scientist in the global non-clinical drug safety department of F. Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel. He has contributed to international pharmaceutical consortia, such as toxicity testing of alternatives to CFCs propellants - IPACT, the ILSI task force on Food Safety in Europe and to working groups of the International Conference on Harmonization - ICH. IN the period from 2004-2009 he as the responsible manager of the European Commission's Research Framework Program 6 Project InnoMed: "Predictive Toxicology - PredTox". Laura Suter-Dick graduated as a biologist from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and subsequently received her PhD from the Free University of Berlin (Germany). She has nearly 20 years of experience within the pharmaceutical industry, mainly in the field of toxicology. During her career in the pharmaceutical industry she worked as a scientist in the reproductive toxicology at Sandoz in Basel. She specialized in molecular toxicology (toxicogenomics) and in vitro assays at F. Hoffmann- La Roche Ltd., where she led the mechanistic toxicology. She has recently been appointed Professor for Molecular Toxicology at the Life Sciences School of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. She acts as an external expert in several scientific panels and is also a Board Member of ESTIV (European Society of Toxicology in vitro).