Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands
I am a well-skilled, enthusiastic scientist with 15 years research experience in different fields including biomarker discovery, drug discovery, preclinical studies, and toxicology. I have worked in academia as well as in industry in several countries and acquired a broad experience in setting up collaborative research projects and people management. I obtained my Ph.D. in molecular biology and a second degree in economy majoring in management and marketing. During my career, I have always been motivated to work on a topic where the outcome of the project is applicable for today and tomorrow’s challenge. It could be the identification of a causative gene for a disease or develop a cost-effective efficacy or toxicological screening assay for drug development. My ambition is to use and expand my knowledge in industry on an inspiring new project and achieve future success
Toxys is a Dutch biotech company that provides innovative in vitro toxicity screening solutions to rapidly identify hazardous and potential carcinogenic properties of novel compounds during the early phases of product and drug development. We aim to bring information to our customers that is essential to make informed decisions on which compounds to progress in the drug/compound development pipeline, thereby contributing to the development of better medicines and products and to reduce animal testing. Every novel chemical compound that is developed by pharmaceutical, chemical, cosmetics or food companies has to be rigorously tested for human health hazards before being considered safe for marketing. Current in vitro genotoxicity tests, which are an essential part of compound risk assessment, generally suffer from a low predictive value, which is a major financial drain for industry. To meet the demands from industry for better tests, Toxys is offering the ToxTracker assay
I supervised national and international projects in the field of toxicology an drug discovery /drug delivery. Besides my scientific role I was responsible for the development of a business plan that supports the structural changes of the pharmaceutical activities of ZF-screens (ZF-pharma) Scientific Projects: Omics based biomarker identification for developmental toxicology (NC3R CRACK-IT PREDART) Toxicological and antibacterial efficacy screening platform for plant extracts (EFRO Extracten Bibliotheek) Applicability domain of the zebrafish larvae model in anti-tuberculosis drug development (IMI PreDiCT-TB) Development of dextran and coild coil motif based drug delivery system (collaboration with LU) Commercialization of zebrafish tools for biomedical application (FishForPharma) Management activities: Developing and executing business plan for ZF-screens Developing novel activities (Toxicology screening and Crispr mutant line generation service) Analyzing market and develop marketing plan and campaigns Supervising PhD students and research technicians Presenting project status for funding agencies Representing ZF-screens in company fairs and scientific conferences
My project "Host factors involved in mycobacterial infection" is supported by the European FP7 Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship program (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-IEF - 274389 - TB host genes). The aim of the project is to use the zebrafish embryo model for tuberculosis (TB) to increase understanding of host genes involved in susceptibility and resistance to mycobacterial infection.I’ve been involved in molecular characterization of novel immune related genes, transcriptome data analyses, and generation of new transgenic zebrafish lines. Core activities: Project scheduling, performing experiments Presenting data, reporting to project leader and funding agency Writing scientific publications and grant applications Supervising students