Pharmacovigilance & Drug Safety

Mircea Ciuca, MD is currently Global Head of Medical & Clinical Drug Safety at Vifor Pharma in Switzerland. He is leading a team of scientists and physicians involved in all aspects of pharmacovigilance, in both development and post-marketing settings. Mr. Ciuca has about 13 years of experience in drug safety. Prior to join Vifor Pharma he held various positions (Deputy QPPV, Senior Pharmacovigilance Medical Manager, Drug Safety Advisor) at large pharmaceutical companies in The Netherlands, after successfully establishing and leading the medical- scientific department of a medium-size CRO in Rotterdam.

Clinical Drug Safety, clinical practice,Pharmacovigilance

John received a BS in biochemistry from Albright College and his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from Brown University. After completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in NYC in the departments of Positron Emission Tomography and Neurology, he joined the Medicinal Chemistry Discovery group at Johnson Matthey Biomedical. There he worked on Pt-based antitumor drugs and peptide-based diagnostic radio-imaging agents. After nearly a decade in drug Discovery, he later moved on to drug development, in positions of increasing responsibility at J&J and Sanofi-Aventis. For the past 15 years he and his teams have specialized in drug delivery and pharmaceutics, focused at the interface of drug discovery and development. His specific expertise in drug delivery lies in the area of enhancing the solubility of insoluble compounds, where he has successfully introduced a wide range of methods into drug discovery space. His research also spans specific areas such as targeted prodrugs and new functional excipients. He currently is a Senior Principal Scientist and Network Technology Lead of the Discovery Pharmaceutical Sciences department at Merck Research Labs. He is co-inventor on 13 US Patents and author of many diverse publications and book chapters in the fields of organic, solid state & medicinal chemistry as well as drug delivery

Organic, solid state & medicinal chemistry and drug delivery

Shawn (Xiaotian) Yin received his Ph. D. in Solid-State Chemistry from University of Waterloo, Canada. He then completed his Post Doctoral fellowship at Department of Materials Sciences and Engineering, Cornell University. Currently, Dr. Yin is a Senior Principal Scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. His research interests include amorphous and nanomaterials for drug delivery, pharmaceutical polymorphic form studies, API crystal form in drug product, physical characterizations of pharmaceutical substances and powder X-ray diffraction applications in pharmaceutical sciences.

Formulation, Drug Delivery, Drug Development

Doctor Antonio Steardo specialized in Pharmacology and graduated in Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Chemist. He has now gained years of experience since 2002 in the pharmaceutical products trade sector as he could have been behind the counter of the Steardo pharmacy from an early age. Already in elementary school, the curiosity for chemistry manifests itself during his games and continues lectures at the department of science at the University of Salerno. Therefore, during the cycle of studies, he prefers biochemistry and biochemistry of drug action, graduating in July 2007 with a thesis on the functioning of the endocannabinoid system on Alzheimer’s disease in pharmacology. Following the beginning of his pharmaceutical chemistry studies, he stopped for a competition as a postgraduate in pharmacology at the University of Rome La Sapienza in July 2014. Expecting constant improvement as a professional update, he enrolled in the continuing professional training department at the University of Oxford to follow courses in Experimental and Translation Therapy and on Medical Research. His desire to improve leads him to attend international conferences and seminars.

biochemistry and biochemistry of drug action