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Curriculum Vitae -- Thomas Hartung, MD, PhDPERSONAL DATA:The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health CURRENT APPOINTMENTS:Director, CAAT PERSONAL STATEMENT:As a biochemist and physician, I pursue cellular and molecular research into diseases to ultimately support testing strategies for drugs and chemicals. My work spans from pharmacology / toxicology to molecular microbiology and immunology with a special focus on the development of cellular methods and their quality control. As professor of pharmacology at the University of Konstanz (1994-), I have worked on supportive therapies to cancer treatment (Neupogen), inflammatory processes infectious diseases and cytokine therapies. With the experience of leading the European Commission’s validation body for alternatives methods (2002-2008) and holding since 2009 a chair for Evidence-based Toxicology, I am interested in the development and quality-control of in silico and in vitro tools and their integration into testing strategies. As PI, I headed until 2017 the Human Toxome project funded as an NIH Transformative Research Grant, which develops the tools for pathway identification from multi-omics approaches. We focus on organotypic cell cultures (microphysiological systems) of the brain, the integration of metabolomics and transcriptomics and making sense by bioinformatics of the “big data” to deduce pathways of toxicity. A key development was a highly standardized human brain organoid, developed with NIH NCATS funding, which is currently commercialized via AxoSim, New Orleans, which took over my spin-off Organome LLC. The model has been used for a number of viral, neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative, neurotoxic and other disease models. Most recently, we showed first with this model that SARS-CoV-2 infects human brain cells. Our work toward Good Read-Across Practice led us to create the largest toxicological database to date and employing machine learning, we recently developed a novel read-across-based structure activity relationship (RASAR), which outperformed the reproducibility of nine OECD guideline animal tests. I have hosted a number of conferences (WC7, PanAm 1 & 2, DNT-4, ESTIV 2018, MPS World Summit 2022) with 200 – 1000 participants and authored more than 625 scientific publications, which were cited more than 40,000 times (h-factor 104). My toxicology classes on COURSERA were taken by more than 15,000 active learners. RESEARCH AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:The main goal of my work is toward a paradigm shift in toxicity testing to improve public health. Due to my background as head of the European Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods of the European Commission (2002-2008), I am involved in the implementation of the 2007 NRC vision document “Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century – a vision and a strategy”. I have furthered the translation of concepts of evidence-based medicine to toxicology (evidence-based toxicology). This aims for systematic assessment of the quality of all tools for regulatory toxicology and the development of new approaches based on annotated pathways of toxicity (the Human Toxome). I have a broad background in clinical and experimental pharmacology and toxicology documented in more than 350 publications. Previous work centered on the immune recognition of bacteria, including pyrogen testing, and the induced inflammatory response. In experimental and clinical approaches, the pharmacological modulation of these responses was studied. I have relocated to the US early 2009 and established beside the directorship for the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) a laboratory for developmental neurotoxicity research based on genomics and metabolomics the respective technologies were made available by a Thought-Leader Award from Agilent. HONORS AND AWARDS:
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