Blueprint Neurotherapeutic Network (BPN), Preclinical Neurotherapeutic Small Molecule Development, High Throughput Screening
Dr. Pascal Laeng joined in April 2015 the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) in the Department of Translational Research (DTR). He serves as a Scientific Project Manager for the Blueprint Neurotherapeutics Network (BPN). Dr. Laeng has more than twenty years of experience in CNS drug discovery and drug development with the biotech industry. Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Laeng has held senior management positions in the Washington DC and Boston-Cambridge areas supervising in vitro pharmacology groups and was leading multidisciplinary drug discovery teams. Dr. Laeng worked in several CNS therapeutic areas including pain, migraine, epilepsy, schizophrenia, cognitive deficits, bipolar disorder, depression, multiple sclerosis, obesity, and neurogenesis. He has extensive experience managing translational CNS research projects from target identification, target validation, in vitro assay development and HTS screening, animal modeling, lead optimization, GMP API and drug product manufacturing, GLP IND-enabling toxicology studies up to Phase I clinical trial. Dr. Laeng received his Ph.D. in Neurobiology at the University of Louis Pasteur (France). He completed postdoctoral training at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich, ETH) in Pr. Melitta Schachner’s laboratory, and at NIH (Bethesda) in the groups of Dr. Ronald McKay (NINDS) and Dr. Charles Gerfen (National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH). Dr. Laeng has also extensive technical expertise in phenotypic screening, cell-based assays, system biology, stem cell biology and in vitro pharmacology.