Breaking the bias in women’s health: exploring sex differences in drug metabolism and toxicology

Dr R Stephanie Huang is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology, University of Minnesota. She is also an Associate Director for the Institute of Personalized Medicine at the University of Minnesota and a Co-Chair of the Genetic Mechanism Program within the Masonic Cancer Center at the University of Minnesota. She is a Chair of the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP; The Hague, Netherlands) Special Interest Group on Personalised and Precision Medicine and a Chair for the Oncology Special Interest Group within the Pharmacogenomics Global Research Network (PGRN; MT, USA). To date, she has published over 120 peer-reviewed research papers, many of which are in high-caliber journals, e.g., Nature, Nature Medicine, PNAS, Blood, Cancer Research, Genome Biology and American Journal of Human Genetics. Dr Huang is a board-certified Clinical Pharmacologist with translational research expertise in genomics, molecular and cell biology, and computational biology.

The primary objective of Dr Huang’s research program is to develop clinically useful models that enable prediction of the risks of non-responsiveness and toxicities to chemotherapeutic medications before they are prescribed to treat the patient. By leveraging pre-clinical, high-throughput drug screening and molecular data for model construction and applying the machine learning models to patient tumor molecular data, the likelihood of patient tumor responses to hundreds of drugs can be imputed in a matter of weeks. These omics-based drug sensitivity projections can then enable identification of biomarkers directly in patient cohorts without the requirement of drug exposure in patients. It can also be used to nominate novel drugs and/or repurpose medications for cancer therapy. More recently, the Huang lab developed new computational algorithms to rationalize select combination therapy and enable individual, cell-level drug sensitivity prediction.

Vibha Jawa

Executive Director for Biotherapeutics Bioanalysis in the Translational Medicine organization

Bristol Myers Squibb (NY, USA)

Flavia Franconi has a master’s degree in Psychiatry, a PhD in Gender Pharmacology and was a full Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Sassari (Italy) from 1986–2017, where she founded and directed the program until 2014. She was the Founder and President of GISeG (Italian Group Health and Gender Medicine: Rome, Italy) from 2009 to 2014. In 2003, she was the Founder and Coordinator of the Gender Pharmacology Group of the Italian Society of Pharmacology. Flavia was also a member of the working group of AIFA “Farmaci e Genere” and is currently the Coordinator of the Gender Medicine Platform of the Interuniversity Consortium INBB. She collaborated with the United Nations to prepare a document for the UN Expert group meeting in March 2011 and contributed to the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI: Turin, Italy) publication for the treatment of alcohol use disorders – In DAWN Drugs and Alcohol Women Network: Promoting a Gender Responsive Approach to Addiction.

From 2021–2024, Flavia has been a member of the National Observatory of Gender Medicine and spokesperson for the Gender Pharmacology Working Group. Flavia was an Editorial Board member of Gender Medicine until 2012 and is currently an Editorial Board member of Biology of Sex Differences and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine – Sex and Gender in Cardiovascular Medicine. Flavia was the Editor of six volumes, including two Italian textbooks in gender pharmacology and gender medicine. She is the author of more than 240 papers published in international journals and books, 80 of which are related to studying sex and gender aspects in medicine and pharmacology.