During this event the representatives of EPAA from both the Commission and Industry side will present the highlights of their work during 2014. Besides, dedicated sessions will address regulatory acceptance of alternative methods. Confirmed speakers including MEP Sirpa Pietikäinen, DG JRC Director-General Vladimir Šucha, DG ENTR Director-General Daniel Calleja Crespo, the Responsible of the OECD Test Guidelines Programme Dr Anne Gourmelon and from the Brazilian ANVISA Dr Joel Majerowicz. 

We are delighted to announce that on the second day of the Annual Meeting of the Swiss Society of Toxicology, which will take place on 13 & 14 November 2014 in Basel, we will hold a Symposium to mark the 5th anniversary of SCAHT which was founded in November 2009. The SCAHT president, National Councillor Prof. Kathy Riklin, and the co-founder of the SCAHT, Prof. Stephan Krähenbühl, will give welcome addresses. Prof. Alan Boobis, Imperial College London, and Prof. Angelo Moretto, University of Milan, both members of the Science Advisory Board, have kindly agreed to add to the festive occasion by giving keynote lectures, and four of the SCAHT Group Leaders will give presentations on SCAHT core research projects. Please see the programme for further details.

Der Einsatz von Pestiziden als Pflanzenschutzmittel in der Landwirtschaft aber auch als Biozide im urbanen Raum war in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten von grossem Nutzen. Diesem Nutzen stehen aber auch Risiken für Mensch und Umwelt gegenüber, die in diesem Kurs näher beleuchtet werden sollen. Ziel des Kurses ist es, den Teilnehmenden einen Überblick zu den Expositionspfaden und den toxischen Wirkungen beim Menschen und in der Umwelt zu geben. In Vorträgen und praktischen Übungen wird vermittelt, wie das Risiko von Pestiziden in der aktuellen Gesetzgebung reguliert wird, und was man über das Vorkommen von Pestizidrückständen in Lebensmitteln und Umwelt weiss. Schliesslich sollen Risikominderungsmassnahmen vorgestellt und ein Ausblick in die Zukunft der Pestizidregulation gewagt werden. 

Green toxicology is the application of predictive toxicology to the production of chemicals with the specific intent of improving their design for hazard reduction. This conference, sponsored by BASF, CAAT, NanoCASE, Novartis, Roche, Sigma-Aldrich and Syngenta, will provide a forum for collaboration among academia and industry working in complementary fields to discover common ground in the quest for safer chemicals.

This course will provide participants with an overview of the current knowledge on the clinical assessment and follow-up of drug safety post-approval and human safety. Drug safety in human patients is the ultimate goal of drug safety scientists. Because limitations of patient populations studied during drug development and uncertainties related to potential drug-drug interactions or rare or idiosyncratic adverse reactions, it is important to pay careful attention to human safety to achieve a better understanding of the safety of drugs on the market used in a wider patient population, for long treatment duration and on various co-medication compared to the population included in the approval package. Human safety plays an important role for assessing drug safety profile in daily conditions of use, which includes adherence to recommended modalities of therapeutic use (pharmacovigilance) as well as exposures deriving from accidental or intentional acute poisonings (clinical toxicology and toxicovigilance), misuse or abuse of therapeutic agents (pharmacodependence) or unintended indications. 

This course will introduce the emerging area of the safety science of the therapeutic application of stem cells, and will address all the key issues that need to be considered by developers of these therapies, including academics and the pharmaceutical/ biotech industry, as well as the important area of regulation. Other new areas of therapy will also be considered, such as genetically-engineered cells. The use of stem cells in the screening of conventional drugs for efficacy and particularly safety will also be investigated. UK and European leaders in these fields, from Industry, Academia and the Regulatory Agencies, will contribute teaching sessions in a small, informal and interactive learning environment. 

The European project NanoReg aims at standardisation of materials in industrial production. Swiss industry is particularely invited to become involved in the activities. Meet with the experts in Bern on 1st October 2014. The annual event in Bern brings together all national competences related to regulation aspects of nanomaterials from federal offices to industry. NanoReg representatives will show the outlines of the project, an overview on achieved Swiss research results and perspectives for future activities, in which new Swiss (industrial) participants can take part. Moreover, related research topics as well as support measures from Euresearch will be presented by the NCP for Nanotechnologies, Advanced Materials and Advanced Manufacturing and Processing (NMP).

Discovering and developing new and better drugs for patients requires the collaboration of an extraordinary number of specialists across many disciplines and organizations. MipTec 2014 introduces new topical forums to cover an even broader range of these disciplines: Infectious diseases, drug discovery information management, and clinical development. As a global hub of pharmaceutical research and development, Basel offers the perfect setting to bridge the gap between the academic life sciences, early drug discovery, and clinical drug development. MipTec 2014 aims to achieve this by providing a platform for networking and scientific exchange for academic and industrial scientists.

A unique feature of this course is that the bioanalyses of both small molecules and biopharmaceuticals are discussed side by side and that the technical aspects of method development are reviewed in the light of the final assay objectives in industry. Integrated bioanalytics represent a variety of important methods to acquire reliable information about the state of a biological system, e.g. by analysing tissues, body fluids. As compounds differ in their physico-chemical properties, appropriate analysis strategies are required for sample separation, pre-treatment, detection methodology and validation. Students will acquire the necessary knowledge to understand the most common methods applied and will be able to define the basic needs to develop, prepare and perform integrated biomolecular analyses, as well as to review and evaluate studies in the bioanalytic field.