Tim Neuberger

Background

About Tim Neuberger

My primary interest and goal is to promote the wider use of disease relevant, primary human cells in the drug discovery and development process. With more than thirty years of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries including more than twenty years of experience developing start to finish solutions to incorporate primary human cells into the drug discovery process, I have the experience and expertise needed to help companies incorporate this technology into their research programs. • Established Vertex Pharmaceutical’s primary human cell platform to support drug discovery efforts across multiple disease areas - Identified domestic and international organizations from which to procure diseased and control human organs and tissues - Negotiated contracts with partner organizations to facilitate the transfer of tissues and organs - Built an international logistics network to ship human tissues and organs • Developed the methods and wrote the SOPs used to isolate human bronchial epithelial (hBE) cells from discarded lungs donated by cystic fibrosis transplant recipients • Established cell culture methods and formulated medias appropriate for large-scale production and differentiation of hBE cells into functional airway epithelium • Built a primary human cell library containing more than vials of hBE cells from more than 100 unique donors across multiple different genotypes • Developed methods and wrote SOPs to dissect human lungs from patients with distal lung disease thereby enabling the large-scale enrichment of type I and type II alveolar cells • Established methods to isolate and culture adult human dorsal root ganglion sensory neurons • Worked up a novel method to isolate hepatocytes from severely fibrotic human livers which could not be processed using traditional hepatocyte isolation methods • Developed protocols and wrote SOPs to isolate kidney cells from normal human kidney as well as kidneys from patients with kidney disease • Organized and managed ongoing training programs to teach scientists to isolate, expand, bank and scale primary human cells derived from both normal and diseased organs