For your viewing convenience, links to the 2022 In Vitro Biology Final Program, Posters, and Abstracts are provided below.

Keynote Speaker:

Thomas Hartung,  MD, PhD, is director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) and the inaugural holder of the Doerenkamp-Zbinden Endowed Chair in Evidence-based Toxicology in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where he has been on the faculty since 2009. He received a doctorate in biochemical pharmacology from the University of Konstanz, Germany, and a medical degree in toxicology in 1992 from the University of Tubingen. He joined the faculty at University of Konstanz in 1994, where he served as an assistant professor of biochemical pharmacology until 1999, an associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology until 2002 and has been an honorary full professor of pharmacology since 2003. From 1996 to 2002, Dr. Hartung also served as the CEO of the Steinbeis Technology Transfer Center for In Vitro Pharmacology and Toxicology (InPuT). He was head of the European Centre for Alternative Methods (ECVAM) at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy and was integral in accelerating the alternative methods validation process, and in establishing a network of more than 400 experts from all stakeholder groups to facilitate global regulatory harmonization in toxicity testing. In 2009, he was named the 2nd most cited German pharmacologist by Laborjournal. He received the Agilent Thought Leader award in 2009 for his research into the use of toxicity pathways to predict developmental neurotoxicity.

Advancing Cell Culture to Meet Scientific and Societal Needs

Science has become a central societal driver; in turn, substantial funding but also enormous expectations as to the benefit from science have been created. These include expectations to provide us with safe and effective drugs as well as protect us against toxicants. While drug development is based on a competition of ideas, the safety sciences largely lack this competition employing often protocols in essence unchanged for more than 50 years. Bioengineering and stem cell technologies have changed the way cell culture can be carried out. This is increasingly embraced in the drug development process, as just evidence in the race to find drugs and vaccines for COVID-19. It is timely, to leverage these technologies also for the safety of patients and consumers, where both an enormous ignorance of the potential risks of large numbers of substances and chemophobia fueled by precautionary approaches and disproportionate risk communication are the consequence. The advent of microphysiological systems (MPS), i.e., cell cultures replicating aspects of organ architecture and functionality represent a key scientific opportunity to develop more relevant test systems and serve society. In combination with the novel computational tools from machine learning (A.I.) and improved objective and transparent handling of the resulting evidence, science, economical applications, regulation and policy-making are served.  The field of MPS is forming with dedicated conferences, societies, journals, best practices for culture (GCCP 2.0) and reporting standards, and educational offers.