Science Advisors

Dr Bob Coleman
Dr Bob Coleman is a pharmacologist with a keen appreciation of the value of using human cells and tissues in the search for new medicines to treat human disease. He worked for 30 years for the Glaxo group of companies, where he gained a wide experience of the drug discovery/development process. In 1995, he left GlaxoWellcome, and joined a colleague in founding Pharmagene, now Asterand (www.asterand.com), the first drug discovery and development company to work exclusively on human biology. In November 2003 he was awarded an honorary DSc by DeMontfort University, Leicester, in recognition of his scientific achievements and his contributions to the experimental use of donated human tissues in drug research. Bob Coleman is now an independent consultant in drug discovery.

Dr Kelly BéruBé
Dr Kelly BéruBé is Director of the Lung & Particle Research Group at Cardiff University. With a background in electron microscopy and lung toxicology, she has built an international reputation in the field of air pollution and human health and holds numerous appointments in the USA and UK on funding bodies, advisory councils, professional societies and journal editorial boards that focus on environmental health. Dr BéruBé is a prolific science writer and popular invited-speaker, and has worked extensively on communicating research through public engagements of science for schools, laymen groups and professional learned societies. Her research, including exciting advances with human ‘microlungs’, which could allow thousands of drugs to be screened at once, has been recognised with a number of awards and keen interest from pharmaceutical companies.

Dr Katya Tsaioun
Dr. Tsaioun is founder and President of Apredica (www.apredica.com), a contract research company based in Boston, USA. Apredica specialises in rapid preclinical in vitro assessment of compounds’ ADME Tox properties for optimising and advancing drug leads. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry from Tufts University and had post-doctoral training in Neurochemistry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tsaioun is active in many local and international professional and business societies and is a co-founder and member of the board of WEALTH (Women Executives Advancing Life Sciences, Technology and Health). She is also a co-founder and member of the management team of Pharma Launcher, a consortium of pharmaceutical Contract Research Organisations.

Dr Margaret Clotworthy
Dr Margaret Clotworthy is the Science Director of Safer Medicines Trust. She has a degree in biotechnology from Dublin City University and a PhD in cell biology from Cambridge University. She has worked on cancer therapies in cell culture lines for KuDOS Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Cambridge. She was awarded a research scholarship from the Irish Health Research Board to assist in the development of an in vitro model for testing treatments for eczema and psoriasis at the Athlone Institute of Technology. Dr Clotworthy co-edited the proceedings of our 2008 conference at the Royal Society, Speed and Safety in Drug Discovery and chairs the Working Party on human tissue availability established at our House of Lords conference in October 2009.

Dr Jarrod Bailey
Dr Jarrod Bailey is a Research Associate in the School of Population and Health Sciences at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Following his PhD in viral genetics, he spent 7 years examining the causes of premature birth in humans, during which time he became increasingly aware of the lack of relevance of animal studies to human clinical progress. He is also a Research Consultant to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in the US and a Science Advisor to 'Project Release and Restitution', concerning laboratory chimpanzees, also in the US.

Dr John Pippin
Dr John Pippin is a cardiologist who has served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, among other institutions, and is the recipient of a five-year American Heart Association Clinician-Scientist research award. He is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed medical publications, and was the founding director of several clinical and research programs, including the James D. Harvey Cardiovascular Research Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is a Senior Medical and Research Advisor to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in the US.

Professor Claude Reiss
Professor Claude Reiss trained as a physician at the University of California, San Diego. He has expertise in fields including molecular biology, genetics and toxicology. For 30 years he was the Research Director of the Molecular Genetics Centre of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. His many positions currently include Presidency of 3 non-profit organisations: Alzheim' R&D - dedicated to the early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases; Reverse Therapies - dedicated to a novel AIDS therapy and Antidote-Europe - dedicated to science-based toxic risk assessment.

Dr Christopher Anderegg
Dr Christopher Anderegg is a medical doctor and biologist, who received his MD and PhD at Yale University School of Medicine. He performed animal experiments in the United States and Switzerland from 1979 until 1988. In 1990, he founded the Association for the Abolition of Animal Experiments in Zurich, Switzerland; an organisation dedicated to exposing the dangers of animal experimentation to human health, and to promoting the use of safe, scientific research methods including epidemiological studies on population groups, clinical investigations of patients, biopsy and autopsy investigations, and experiments with human cell, tissue and organ cultures.