Toxys Strengthens Executive Team with Appointment of a CSO
Today, Toxys announces the appointment of Torben Østerlund as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO). Toxys BV is a biotech company based in Leiden, The Netherlands, that provides innovative in vitro toxicity screening solutions to identify hazardous properties of compounds for the pharmaceutical, chemical, cosmetics and food industries. Toxys developed the ToxTracker, ReproTracker and ToxProfiler assays that provide unique and highly valuable insight into the mode-of-action of toxic substances. With this strengthened leadership, Toxys will further accelerate business growth to become an industry-leader in animal-free chemical safety testing.
Torben Østerlund is appointed as CSO. After various academic research positions at leading Swedish universities, Torben joined the Danish biotech CRO Bioneer in 2007 as group leader of mammalian cell technology. After serving as in vitro pharmacologist and project leader at leading Danish biotechnology company Zealand Pharma, Torben moved to AstraZeneca in 2014 to support cell assay development and later drug safety assessment and toxicology including cell-based safety assays. In 2018, he joined the Swedish biotech CRO Pelago Bioscience and in 2019 Torben was appointed as Head of cell biology at Belgian biotechnology company Confo Therapeutics. Torben holds a MSc degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Odense University, Denmark and a PhD degree in Cell- and Molecular Biology from Lund University, Sweden.
“I am very excited and proud about the appointment of Torben as Chief Scientific Officer at Toxys. He brings scientific expertise about safety assessment and in vitro cell assay development. Torben has experience in drug development within big pharma, assay development in small biotech and providing services as a CRO. He shares our spirit of innovation and will lead the scientific developments at Toxys and will further enable the intended growth of Toxys” said Giel Hendriks, CEO of Toxys BV.
