Confirmed Speakers

The Organising Committee is pleased to announce that the following speakers have confirmed their attendance to the Translating PKPD – (Retro)Perspectives Conference. More speakers TBA.

• Per Artursson, Uppsala University (SE)
• Lassina Badolo, AstraZeneca (SE)
• Christoffer Bundgaard, Lundbeck (DK)
• Elizabeth de Lange, Leiden University (NL)
• William F Elmquist, Minnesota University (US)
• Lena Friberg, Uppsala University (SE)
• Markus Fridén, AstraZeneca, Uppsala University (SE)
• Margareta Hammarlund-Udenaes, Uppsala University (SE)
• Yang Hu, Boehringer Ingelheim (AU)
• Rasmus Jansson-Löfmark, AstraZeneca (SE)
• Mats Karlsson, Uppsala University (SE)
• Jane Knöchel, AstraZeneca (SE)
• Irena Loryan, Uppsala University (SE)
• Pär Matsson, Gothenburg University (SE)
• Elisabet Nielsen, Uppsala University (SE)
• Gunilla Osswald, BioArctic (SE)
• Stephan Schmidt, University of Florida (US)
• Danica Stanimirovic, National Research Council of Canada (CAN)
• Stina Syvänen, Uppsala University (SE)
• Tetsuya Terasaki, University of Eastern Finland (FI) and Tohoku University (J)
• Muhammad Waqas Sadiq, AstraZeneca (SE)

Per Artursson is Professor of Dosage Form Design at the Department of Pharmacy, Uppsala University, Sweden, where he heads the Drug Delivery research team. He is also Director of the Uppsala University drug optimization and pharmaceutical profiling platform, UDOPP, within Science for Life Laboratories. His research aims at understanding drug absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination (ADME) at the molecular and cellular level in order to deliver drugs more effectively via the oral route.

Professor Artursson also investigates the influence of drug transporting proteins, drug metabolizing enzymes and cellular and sub-cellular drug uptake, distribution and elimination. For this purpose, both 2D and 3D cell cultures are used in combination with state-of-the-art omics and bioinformatics. Both traditional small drug molecules and biopharmaceuticals such as peptide and antisense oligonucleotides are investigated. He has published more than 200 research articles and 50 reviews and book chapters, is highly cited and has received several international awards for his research.

Dr. Lassina Badolo is Executive Director and Head of DMPK, Early Respiratory & Immunology at AstraZeneca R&D. Dr. Badolo graduated from the Free University of Brussels where he took his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry and in vitro Toxicology. After a brief Post-Doc in Strasbourg, he joined Lundbeck AS (Denmark) and worked in preclinical DMPK for 6 years followed by 12 years in Discovery DMPK. In April 2021 Dr. Badolo was recruited to AstraZeneca R&D.

An expert in DMPK and its use through the entire value chain from drug discovery to drug development, Dr. Lassina has more than 20 years of experience from the pharma industry and academia, including more than 30 scientific papers.

Dr. Christoffer Bundgaard is Director of Translational DMPK at H. Lundbeck A/S, an international Danish pharmaceutical company, which, with approximately 5,000 employees is focused on developing products for the central nervous system. Dr. Bundgaard received his PhD at the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty of Pharmaceutical sciences, with thesis: Integrated Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Studies and Modelling Approaches of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors - Preclinical Findings on Escitalopram.

In 2004, Christoffer Bundgaard was recruited to H. Lundbeck A/S where he was responsible for quantitative PK/PD assessment, including modeling and translation for matured discovery drug candidates. From 2017 to 2019, Dr. Bundgaard worked as ADME Research Advisor at Eli Lilly (UK) before returning to Copenhagen and his current position.

Prof. Elizabeth de Lange is trained in chemistry, with a specialization in Biophysical Chemistry (Groningen University, The Netherlands). Professor de Lange obtained her PhD in Pharmacology (Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research (LACDR), Leiden University, The Netherlands, and has published >130 peer-reviewed research articles and has an h-index of 46. She is currently supervising 6 PhD students, in addition to mentoring postdocs and early researchers.

Prof. Elizabeth de Lange is the Principal Investigator on Predictive Pharmacology in the Division of Systems Biomedicine & Pharmacology at the LACDR. Her aim is to adequately predict human drug effects using predictive pharmacological (translational) approaches.

William F Elmquist, Distinguished Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutics, Minnesota University, studies the biochemical and physiological determinants of drug absorption, distribution and elimination. Recent studies have focused on the role of drug transport proteins in drug distribution to target tissues.

Prof. Elmquist's current research examines the effect that various multidrug resistance proteins (drug efflux pumps), such as the p-glycoprotein (P-gp), and similar efflux proteins, the multidrug-resistance associated proteins (MRPs), have on drug targeting to the central nervous system (CNS). The use of molecular biology, in vitro models, intracerebral microdialysis, and gene knockout animals have been essential tools in this research.

Lena Friberg is Professor of Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics at Uppsala University. She obtained a PhD in Pharmacokinetics and Drug Therapy in 2003. Professor Friberg’s research focuses on developing approaches for predictive translation of effects from preclinical data to patients, both for desired outcomes and adverse events. Important achievements include frameworks to be applied for optimized dosing strategies of new and available drugs in the areas of oncology and infection.

Professor Friberg has published >150 peer-reviewed research articles and has an h-index of 49. She is currently supervising 9 (+2) PhD students, in addition to mentoring Postdocs and early researchers. Lena Friberg is also heading the teaching unit Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacotherapy and Clinical Pharmacy. In addition to teaching undergraduate students in PKPD, Pharmacometrics and Drug development, she also gives courses to professionals on PKPD-modeling and the use of translation for improved drug development.

Dr. Markus Fridén is currently Principal Scientist and Team Leader at AstraZeneca R&D’s Inhalation Product Development, Biopharmaceutics. Dr. Fridén has to date published and/or contributed to 54 research works.

Dr. Fridén defended his Doctoral thesis, Development of Methods for Assessing Unbound Drug Exposure in the Brain: In vivo, in vitro and in silico at Uppsala University’s Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, providing pharmaceutical industry and academia efficient tools to obtain and to use relevant estimates of drug exposure in the brain for evaluating drugs candidates.

Margareta Hammarlund-Udenaes, Professor Emerita at Uppsala University, has throughout her long and fruitful career published more than 145 scientific papers and accomplished outstanding scientific achievements, focusing on fundamental and functional aspects of pharmacokinetics-pharmacodynamics (PKPD) in health and disease, with special focus on drug delivery to the brain and methods focusing on measuring clinically relevant delivery..

Professor Em. Hammarlund-Udenaes is an honorary member of the Swedish Pharmaceutical Society and Uppsala University’s Pharmaceutical Student Union. In 2021, she became the first researcher from the Nordic countries to receive the prestigious Arïens Award. In 2021, she was also awarded the Rune Lönngren Prize by the Swedish Pharmaceutical Society for her work with clinical pharmacy.

Yang Hu is Associate principal scientist, Lab Head, at Boehringer Ingelheim RCV. Yang Hu took his Ph.D. in Translational PKPD at Uppsala University with thesis Drug delivery to the brain by liposomes: understanding factors governing delivery outcomes in vivo. He continued his career as a Post-Doc at Uppsala University, working with a focus on evaluating the impact of drug transport across the CNS and PNS barriers and target-site exposure on the development of drug-induced neurotoxicity, as a part of EU-IMI2 project NeuroDeRisk.

In March 2022, Yang Hu was recruited to Boehringer Ingelheim RCV where he is currently Associate principal scientist with a focus on oncology drug discovery ADME/PK.

Rasmus Jansson Löfmark is Head of DMPK at AstraZeneca, a global, science-led biopharmaceutical company whose innovative medicines are used by millions of patients worldwide.

Rasmus Jansson Löfmark's focus areas include Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Modelling, Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic Models and Predictions models for tissue distributions of drug compounds.

In 2001, Mats Karlsson was named the world's first Professor of Pharmacometrics. Twenty years later, the pharmacometrics environment at Uppsala University still lacks equivalent in the academic world. To date, more than seventy PhD students have defended their dissertations in the corridor that today is the workplace for some forty pharmacists, chemists, biologists, system developers and statisticians. The laboratory is both interdisciplinary and international - and it delivers. A search for Mats Karlsson in the PubMed medical database generates more than 400 scientific publications.

Professor Karlsson is currently focusing on rare diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, where healthcare receives enormous amounts of patient-reported data, but lacks the tools to fully utilise them.

“We can also see how health economists are approaching pharmacometrics, which is opening several interesting doors. The advances in precision medicine means additional need for methods to extract knowledge from biological data. In short, I am just as inspired by this field today as when I first discovered it, and hopefully we have many more scientific contributions ahead of us,” Professor Karlsson stated in a recent interview.

Dr. Jane Knöchel is currently a clinical pharmacometrician in the cardiovascular, renal and metabolism (CVRM) clinical pharmacology and quantitative pharmacology group at AstraZeneca applying pharmacometric approaches to inform drug development.

Dr. Knöchel's background is within applied mathematics, in particular model order reduction of systems pharmacology models using ideas from control theory. In her PhD research a novel input-response index was developed that allows to reduce and analyse large-scale mechanistics.

Irena Loryan is an Associate Professor in the translational Pharmacokinetics-Pharmacodynamics (tPKPD) group at Uppsala University’s Department of Pharmacy. Irena Loryan received her M.D. in 2001 and Ph.D. in pharmacology and biochemistry in 2007 from Yerevan State Medical University, Armenia.

After working as a post-doctoral fellow at Karolinska Institutet, Irena Loryan was recruited to Uppsala University in 2011. Her current research interest focuses on neuropharmacokinetics, implying mechanistic understanding of drug disposition in central and peripheral nervous systems involving passage across CNS and PNS barriers, distribution within parenchyma and elimination processes in health and disease, with focus on neurodegenerative diseases.

is Professor of Pharmacokinetics at Gothenburg University, conducting research on cellular and molecular pharmacokinetics with the aim to clarify molecular and cellular mechanisms of drug disposition through a combination of wet-lab experiments and computational modeling and simulation. The Matsson group particularly focus on disposition mechanisms and intracellular exposure of new drug modalities, and development of methodologies to study this in vitro and in silico.

Professor Matsson is also Scientific Director of OligoNova, the full-scale technology platform that, with extensive funding from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, provides support to assist promising projects within Therapeutic oligonucleotides all the way to clinical studies. Thus, strengthening Sweden’s abilities to claim a position on absolute front line of this field of science.

Elisabet Nielsen is Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University. She began her doctoral thesis work in the Pharmacometric Research Group at Uppsala University related to predictive models characterizing pharmacokinetics (PK) and pharmacodynamics (PD) of antibiotics. After finishing her PhD in 2011, she performed a post-doctoral project focusing on quantifying the role of the immune system in bacterial infections.

Elisabet Nielsen conducts research in the area of Clinical Pharmacy, focusing on translational and personalized medicine. Her main research focus is within the infectious disease area, where she has 15 years of experience working with pharmacometric models for antibacterials. Elisabet Nielsen has published >50 peer-reviewed research articles and is currently (co-) supervising 8 PhD student projects and post-doctoral projects.

Gunilla Osswald has a PhD in PK/PD from Uppsala University, with Margareta Hammarlund-Udenaes as the professor and supervisor. During her 40 years in the pharmaceutical industry – much of it spent at Astra and AstraZeneca in clinical development and global leadership roles – she has continuously emphasized the importance of PK/PD during drug development. Since 2014, Gunilla is the CEO of BioArctic.

BioArctic’s proprietary technology platform, dedicated personnel, collaborations with leading academic research groups and the global pharma industry have made it possible to develop innovative treatments based on antibodies (immunotherapy) for neurodegenerative disorders.

is an endowed Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics and Director of the Center for Pharmacometrics and Systems Pharmacology at University of Florida. He received his B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany in 2003 and his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2008, before completing a 3 year postdoctoral in the Division of Pharmacology at the Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research in The Netherlands. During his postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Schmidt was also a member of the Dutch Top Institute Pharma PK-PD modeling platform.

Stephan Schmidt is the recipient of several prestigious awards and a Subject Editor for the European Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, and serves on the Board of Regents for the American College of Clinical Pharmacology.

Danica Stanimirovic, MD, PhD is Director of the Translational Bioscience Department, NRC’s Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre.  She manages a portfolio of R&D projects aimed at developing, de-risking and advancing complex bio-therapeutics through preclinical development, in partnership with academia and biopharma companies. Her scientific focus is on antibody and gene therapies for neurological diseases.

 A recipient of several Canadian and international awards, Danica has led strategic NRC Programs and served on Scientific Advisory Boards of biopharma companies and international R&D initiatives  She is a founding member of the International Brain Barriers Society and Adjunct Professor at the University of Ottawa.  Trained in medicine and neurology at the University of Belgrade, and in brain research at the National Institutes of Health, USA, she has authored over 170 manuscripts and 22 patents in the field of integrative neuroscience, innovative biologics and drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier. 

Stina Syvänen is a Professor at Uppsala University. Her research is focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms behind Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia. Stina Syvänen’s group have generated antibodies that bind specifically to different forms of Aβ or α-synuclein. Some of the antibodies have also been modified to bind the transferrin receptor (TfR), which is normally involved in iron transport into the brain. The interaction with TfR works like a molecular Trojan horse, which transports the antibody into the brain, where it can bind to its target. This modification increases antibody brain concentration up to 100-fold. These bispecific antibodies have been explored as novel PET radioligands and as immunotherapeutics.

In parallel, Professor Syvänen studys changes in the blood-brain barrier (BBB) during neurodegeneration. She also uses small molecule PET radioligands to investigate pathology in the ageing brain focusing mainly on protein deposits, neuroinflammation and synaptic dysfunction.

Tetsuya Terasaki, Ph.D., is Research Director of Bioanalytics, School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland and Professor Emeritus of Tohoku University, Japan. He received a Ph.D. degree in Biopharmacy from University of Tokyo in 1982 and was appointed Professor of Tohoku University in 1996 and Distinguished Professor of Tohoku University in 2008.

Prof. Terasaki's major research interest is pharmacoproteomics of CNS and ocular barriers. He has published over 320 research articles, 75 review articles and 55 book chapters. He received the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon, bestowed by the Government of Japan in 2013. He was selected as a “Highly Cited Researcher 2016” by Clarivate Analytics and his h-index is 74. He retired from Tohoku University and has received an opportunity to continue his research at University of Eastern Finland (UEF) in 2020.

Dr. Muhammad Waqas Sadiq is currently Group Director & Team Lead, CPQP R&I at AstraZeneca, with a focus on bringing new treatment options to patients by meaningful research in drug development. Dr. Waqas Sadiq has a strong interest in exploring the field of Clinical Pharmacology and Clinical Drug development.

Dr. Waqas Sadiq conducted his doctoral studies at Uppsala University’s Faculty of Pharmacy with thesis In vivo active drug uptake and efflux at the blood-brain barrier with focus on drug transport interactions.
 

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