Event
BIOE Seminar: Helena Hogberg
Friday, October 12, 2018
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room 2132
Dr. Giuliano Scarcelli
scarc@umd.edu
Dr. Helena Hogberg
Deputy Director
Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing
Bloomberg School of Public Health
The Johns Hopkins University
3Rs and its application in toxicology
The Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) has for more than 35 years been a leading force in the USA to promote humane science by supporting the creation, development, validation, and use of alternatives to animals in research, product safety testing, and education. We seek to effect change by working with scientists in industry, government, and academia to find new ways to replace animals with non-animal methods, reduce the numbers of animals necessary, or refine methods to make them less painful or stressful to the animals involved.
The National Research Council report from 2007 "Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A vision and a strategy" (Tox-21c) has created an atmosphere of departure in the USA. It suggests moving away from traditional (animal) testing to modern technologies based on toxicity pathways.
The current developments on OECD level are to organize our knowledge on hazard manifestations as Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOP). The concept of toxicity pathways is part of the AOP and describes the molecular definition of mechanism and the perturbed networks.
In the last years several new 3Rs techniques, such as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), 3D cell models, human-on-chip approaches, omics methods, evidence-based toxicology and read-across tools, have been developed to implement the vision and strategy of Tox-21c.
About the Speaker
Helena Hogberg, Ph.D., is the Deputy Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore MD. She received her PhD in Toxicology from the Physiology Department at Stockholm University, Sweden in 2009. The scientific work during her PhD was performed at the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), European Commission, Ispra, Italy and aimed to develop new in vitro approaches to detect chemicals with developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) potential with a focus on gene expression and electrical activity recordings.
Together with Dr. Hartung she started the current laboratory at CAAT as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2010. She was later promoted to faculty position and was appointed the Deputy Director of the Center in the beginning of 2016. Her current research activity is still in the field of DNT with the use of emerging tools such as 3D organotypic cell models, induced pluripotent stem cells and omics (transcriptomics and metabolomics) approaches. As the Deputy Director of the Center she is also coordinating the administration to support the different programs of the Center and directing the different research activities.
