Workshops

September 25th, 2012

Pre-Conference Workshops

09:00 - 12:00 Workshop A: Stem Cell Based Systems for Gene Expression Profiling, Pathway Dissection and Drug Discovery: Scientific and Organizational Challenges

Stem cell-based approaches have the potential to revolutionize drug discovery. However, many stem cell-related concepts are radically different from those of traditional R&D and as such, integrating these concepts into today’s drug discovery culture raises a number of scientific and organizational challenges.

This workshop will focus on key challenges and opportunities in stem cell-based drug discovery today. We will aim at identifying solutions that can make the use of stem cells a transformative approach to R&D.

Specifically, this workshop will look to bring together:

• Drug developers from leading pharmaceutical companies who will share their experience and expectations of stem cell-based models • Biotech representatives who will describe how emerging technologies will help facilitate the use of stem cells in R&D • Academic and government researchers who will bring their experience using stem cells for disease modeling, gene expression profiling and high-throughput screening

Attend this workshop to understand the latest developments in the field and take the information back to the lab to direct your research and development efforts.

Workshop leader

Arnaud Lacoste, Project Team Leader, Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine, Novartis

Arnaud is a Project Team Leader at Novartis where he has pioneered the use of reprogramming technologies and pluripotent stem cells.

Arnaud’s group combines reprogramming technologies, genome editing and large-scale production (multi-billion cell scale) of human iPSC-derived cell types to generate drug discovery models with unprecedented disease- and patientrelevance.

Prior to his appointment at Novartis, Arnaud was in charge of the Rockefeller University Embryonic Stem Cell and Reprogramming Facility in New York. This group served academic members of the New York Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative including Cornell University, Rockefeller University and the Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center.

1:00pm - 2:00pm Workshop B: Harnessing the Power of In Silico Modeling to Direct In Vitro and Preclinical Strategy

When building in silico models based on a dataset a fact that is often not considered is that there is plenty of freely available knowledge that could be of high value and relevance. Such information can direct strategy and decision making early in drug development and significantly reduce pipeline costs.

This workshop will initially show how and where to find relevant knowledge to better understand what you actually want to model and how it can be used in conjunction with your own data.

The main body of the workshop will then focus on how these models can be used in an integrated manner to get a more thorough understanding of the biology one is dealing with.

Attending this workshop will therefore allow you to effectively bridge your in silico and wet work to inform in vitro assay selection. Such insight will therefore allow you to synergistically harness the power of the two main arms of preclinical development.

Workshop leader

Josef Scheiber, Founder, Biovariance

Josef received his doctoral training at the Department of Pharmacy at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität. He then postdoc’ed at Novartis in Cambridge, Massachussetts in Lead Discovery Informatics working on methods for in silico elucidation of adverse drug reactions. In late 2009 he moved to Roche where worked on Informatics projects at the interface of oncology and translational research. From April 2010 he also became a member of the global leadership team for Disease & Translational Informatics. Josef left Roche in February 2012 to set up an own company - BioVariance - which works on bringing medical value content from science into healthcare.