Our PanelistsDr. Terry Riss, Senior Product Manager, Cell Health, Promega CorporationDr. Terry Riss started the Cell Biology program at Promega Corporation in 1990. He managed the development of cell viability, cytotoxicity, apoptosis, and protease assay systems and lead efforts to identify and promote multiplexing of cell-based assays to determine the mechanism of cell death. He now serves as Senior Product Manager, Cell Health, involved in outreach educational training activities, including validating assay systems applied to 3D cell culture models. Terry is also an editor of the In Vitro Cell-Based Assays section of the Assay Guidance Manual hosted by The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the NIH.Dr. Tim Spicer, Senior Scientific Director, Department of Molecular Medicine, Scripps ResearchDr. Tim Spicer is the Senior Scientific Director in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research. He has more than 30 years of experience in drug discovery, including ten years at Bristol-Myers Squibb. He is currently the director of HTS and discovery biology and co-directs the screening center at Scripps. Tim supervises HTS assay development & related efforts, including technology development funded through the NIH with an award for the “Advanced Development and Validation of 3-Dimensional Spheroid Culture of Primary Cancer Cells using Nano3D Technology”. He has authored >125 drug-discovery-related publications and is an inventor on 3 patents.Dr. Jan Lichtenberg, Co-Founder & CEO, InSpheroDr. Jan Lichtenberg is Co-Founder and CEO of InSphero – the largest biotech specialized in 3D cell-culture technologies for discovery and safety. Jan co-founded InSphero in 2009 and grew the company to 65 employees in Switzerland and the US while expanding the business to encompass all top 15 global pharmaceutical companies. Prior to InSphero, Jan had VP R&D and Product Management positions at Hocoma AG (medical robotics) and Uwatec (microelectronics). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Neuchâtel and managed a research group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. Since 2021, he is a Board Member of the Society of Laboratory Science and Screening (SLAS).

Our PanelistsProf. Matthias Hebrok, Professor at the Diabetes Center at the University of California San FranciscoMatthias Hebrok is Hurlbut-Johnson Distinguished Professor in Diabetes Research at the Diabetes Center at the University of California San Francisco. He received his Diploma degree in Cell Biology from the Albert-Ludwigs University, performed his PhD thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute, and conducted his postdoctoral research at HHMI at Harvard University. His laboratory has made seminal contributions to our understanding of how embryonic signals control the fetal development of the pancreas and its insulin-producing beta cells. His recent work has implemented the information gained from these studies to generate functional beta cells from human stem cell populations for cell therapy purposes.Prof. Matthias von Herrath, Vice President and Senior Medical Officer at Novo Nordisk Matthias von Herrath holds a dual appointment as Vice President and Senior Medical Officer at Novo Nordisk and Professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology Center for Autoimmunity and Inflammation. He received his medical degree from the Freiburg Medical School in Germany and completed his residency work in the Internal Medicine/Immunology department at the Freiburg Medical Center. For his postdoctoral work, Dr. von Herrath went to The Scripps Research Institute and worked in its Neuropharmacology and Immunology departments. Matthias is committed to clinical translation of immune-based interventions in autoimmune and metabolic diseases. His expertise and main strength is working at the interface of experimental research to interpret and refine early phase I/II clinical trials in order to optimize strategies for phase 3 trials and drug approval.Prof. Mark Peakman, Senior Director of Autoimmunity and Type 1 Diabetes research at SanofiMark Peakman trained in medicine at University College London and pursued postgraduate training in clinical immunology. After his PhD on the immune system in type 1 diabetes he held a senior clinical research fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to the UK to oversee research at King’s College London in the Department of Immunobiology, focused on T lymphocytes in autoimmune disease. In 2019 Mark took a position as Senior Director of Autoimmunity and Type 1 Diabetes research at Sanofi, with the goal of designing and implementing strategies to bring disease modifying therapies to patients with autoimmunity.Dr. Burcak Yesildag, Vice President – Diabetes Research at InSphero AGBurcak Yesildag is the Vice President of the Diabetes Research at InSphero AG. She received her MSc degree in Biochemistry and PhD degree in Translation Biomedicine from ETHZ (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich). Her team at InSphero is strongly committed to the development of standardized, high throughput compatible and physiologically relevant assay systems and disease models for the study of type 1 and type 2 diabetes with primary or stem-cell derived human tissues. Her goal is to utilize these novel and robust models in collaborations with a broad scientific community around the world, in order to accelerate the clinical translation of novel discoveries and to contribute to the overall efficiency and reproducibility of the pancreatic islet research.

Our PanelistsAcademic PerspectiveProf. Jaap den Toonder, Professor and Chair of the Microsystems section, Eindhoven University of TechnologyJaap is a full professor and Chair of the Microsystems section at Eindhoven University of Technology, and former Principal Scientist and Chief Technologist at Philips Research. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on the investigation and development of novel microsystems design approaches and out-of-cleanroom fabrication technologies. His application focus is on microfluidic chips, biomedical microdevices, organs-on-chips, and soft microrobotics. The section’s research approaches are often biologically inspired, translating principles from nature into technological innovations.Academic PerspectiveDr. Peter Loskill, Assistant Professor, Research Institute for Women’s Health, Eberhard Karls University TübingenPeter is an Assistant Professor at the Research Institute for Women’s Health Faculty of Medicine at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. He is also Head of Innovation Field at Fraunhofer IGB, Coordinator of the European Organ-on-Chip training network MSCA-ITN-EUROoC, and Vice-Chair of the European-Organ-on-Chip-Society (EUROoCS). He holds a PhD in Physics from Saarland University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. In 2015, he was named as one of Technology Review’s “Innovators under 35 Germany” and awarded a Fraunhofer ATTRACT starting grant. His interdisciplinary µOrganoLab combines approaches from engineering, biology, physics and medicine to generate and apply novel microphysiological tissue models recapitulating complex human biology in vitro.Industry PerspectiveDr. Florian Fuchs, Senior Principle Scientist, Nuvisan Innovation Campus BerlinFlorian is a Lab head within Lead Discovery at the Nuvisan Innovation Campus Berlin and former group leader on complex cellular models and cell-based screening at Novartis Basel. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from the Ludwig Maximilians University at Munich.Biopharma PerspectiveDr. Olivier Frey, Head of Platforms and Technologies, InSphero AGOlivier is Head of Technologies & Platforms and the Lead Project Manager of Microphysiological Systems at InSphero AG. He is a former group leader of the Bio Engineering Laboratory of ETHZ (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich). He holds a Dr.Sc in Microtechnology from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and an MSc in Microtechnology, Mechanics from ETH Zürich.

This episode aired originally live at https://newfrontiersin3d.com/In this podcast we address key questions, such as:Do animals predict human drug safety correctly? What are the general limitations?How can we increase predictivity of drug safety for patients?What are the challenges for evaluating new therapeutic modalities?What are the most promising new animal-free technologies and testing strategies for risk assessment?What will drug safety risk assessment look like in 2030?Our SpeakersPharmaceutical Industry PerspectiveDr. Stefan Platz, Senior Vice President and Head of Clinical Pharmacology and Safety Services, R&D, AstraZenecaStefan is a senior R&D leader and passionate scientist at AstraZeneca globally leading clinical pharmacology, pharmacometrics, as well as toxicology and pathology. Creating ground-breaking medicines and being led by innovative science is in the center of his work. Stefan is a board-certified toxicologist in addition to earlier qualifying as a certified veterinary pathologist at the University of Munich. He has over 25 years of experience working across global pharmaceutical companies including Roche and AstraZeneca.Academic PerspectiveProf. Thomas Hartung, Professor, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public HealthThomas is a Professor of Evidence-based Toxicology and Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Konstanz. He is a passionate advocate for replacing animal testing with more ethical and predictive in vitro models and is investigating new applications for big data and artificial intelligence in toxicity testing.Biotech PerspectiveProf. Armin Wolf, Chief Scientific Officer, InSpheroAn accomplished pharma R&D executive and board-certified toxicologist with more than 30 years cumulative experience at Novartis and Janssen, Armin is a leading expert in mechanistic and investigative safety and discovery, dedicated to the development of physiologically relevant models for industry applications. Armin joined InSphero as CSO in 2019. He maintains a dual appointment as a Professor of Toxicology at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany