Adriano Henney is 'After dinner keynote speaker' on April 19, after the dinner and poster sessions.

Title: Advancing Predictive Medicine

Bio

Dr Henney has a PhD in Medicine and many years’ academic research experience, studying cardiovascular disease at the pathological, cellular, molecular and genetic level in aboratories in London, Cambridge and Oxford.  He then moved into industry, spending 13 years with AstraZeneca. Ultimately leading global programmes exploring strategic improvements aimed at reducing drug failure in development, he created and headed a new department that focused on pathway mapping and modelling, which evolved to establish the practice of Systems Biology, supporting projects in discovery and development. 

Dr Henney has extensive experience in directing and managing large, complex teams across  disciplinary, cultural and geographic boundaries, latterly in the area of Systems Biology and Systems Medicine. His experience in this area led to an invitation to direct the major €50M German national flagship programme, The Virtual Liver Network.  At the time, the largest Systems Biology programme in Europe it involved management of over 200 contributing scientists from a range of disciplines, including clinicians, and 69 Principle Investigators in 36 independent institutions, including industry, distributed over the whole of Germany, working on 44 projects. Operating as a distributed team, rather than a consortium, the leaders successfully implemented a range of modelling approaches focused on liver function and dysfunction that reached from the lab bench into clinical studies on volunteers and patients.

Following the end of the VLN Programme, Dr Henney was elected to be part-time Executive Director of the Virtual Physiological Human Institute, a not-for-profit organisation promoting the use of computational modelling and simulation to interpret quantitative biological information and understand the dynamics of biological and physiological function. As part of that role, he is engaged in establishing a new partnership with industry, The Avicenna Alliance for Predictive Medicine, which focuses on developing a policy framework supporting the use of in silico technologies in medicine.