Bio: As a scientist at Roche in Basel, Switzerland, Dr. Remi Villenave focuses on developing in vitro methodologies, applying them to refine the risk/benefit assessment of new drugs and increasing their regulatory acceptance. Prior, Dr. Villenave was part of Emulate scientific founding team following a postdoc at the Harvard’s Wyss Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his PhD from Queens University Belfast.

Abstract: Scientific challenges and societal change have motivated the pharmaceutical industry to explore the application of human MPS throughout the entire drug development pipeline. In addition, new types of molecules and therapeutic modalities have highlighted the limits of animal models’ translatability to humans. While various MPS have been used in the pharmaceutical industry at each stage of preclinical drug development for almost a decade now, there remain numerous challenges to their wide adoption, and their impact on the overall drug development pipeline is still difficult to ascertain. This presentation will provide a general overview of application of MPS from diverse organs and disease models in drug development, with a focus on preclinical safety assessment, discuss lessons learned from recent years of in-house and contract-out MPS use at Roche and give a perspective on successes, current and foreseen challenges, as well as future trends in the use of complex in vitro testing methods by pharma.