Please join the Tech Council of Maryland’s MdBio Division for the second webinar of the new MdBio Webinar Series. This webinar features Andrew Eisen, MD, PhD who will discuss translation medicine (TM).   

Translational Medicine is broadly focused on identifying appropriate clinical indications for any drug-target pair, the patients most likely to have a favorable response to therapy and optimization of both the dose and schedule for drug administration.  

Biomarkers, the tools of TM, serve as measures of potential responsiveness, downstream consequences of drug-target engagement and as potential surrogates for long-term clinical response.  As such, biomarkers can accelerate drug development by reducing the time, cost and number of patients required to assess both clinical safety and efficacy.

Several examples will be presented illustrating how pharmacodynamic (PD) biomarkers can be used to select an indication and patients, optimize dosage and finally the novel use of circulating tumor cells to ascertain whether the dosing schedule for an intravenous cancer drug was appropriate.  The last example was used in a biomarker-based clinical trial design that reduced the time, cost and number of patients required to assess potential efficacy.   Furthermore, PD measurements in CTCs identified a patient sub-set with a higher likelihood of responding to the drug.

About the Speaker:

Andrew Eisen, MD, PhD has over 25 years of post-graduate experience in basic and applied clinical research.  He currently provides consultant services in the field of Translational Medicine and use of Biomarkers for Biotechs & Pharma. He received his A.B. in physics from Princeton in 1976 and his MD/PhD  (biophysics) in 1982 from the University of Pennsylvania.  His clinical training was completed at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (Pediatrics) and in the Genetics and Biochemistry Branch of The NIDDK (Clinical and Molecular).  

He began his academic career in 1989 at The Albert Einstein College of Medicine (NY) as an Asst. Professor of Pediatrics & Molecular Genetics.  There, his laboratory was engaged in basic research on homologous recombination with applications to gene therapy.  This work lead Dr. Eisen to become scientific co-founder of ArborVita Associates, a biotech engaged in the development and commercialization of a direct genome modification / gene targeting method he developed.  

Dr. Eisen then joined the genomics-based CuraGen Corp. (CT) in 1999 to start and lead the drug target discovery program in Metabolic Diseases in a partnership with Bayer. Subsequently he moved to Daiichi-Sakyo Pharma (NJ) in 2005 to bring pharmacogenomics and translational expertise to early drug development.  In 2008 he was recruited to Eisai Pharma (NJ) to develop and lead Translational Medicine / Biomarker efforts across multiple therapeutic areas.  In 2011 he started Translational Medicine Strategies Consulting.