With over 20 years of experience in the pharmacovigilance domain, Anand Ananthakrishnan currently holds the position of Senior Director of Drug Safety and Pharmacovigilance at Blueprint Medicines, a biotechnology firm located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before joining Blueprint Medicines, he served as the Director of PV Safety Systems and Operations at Fresenius Medical Care North America and as the Associate Director of Safety Systems at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. An advocate for the use of technology in pharmacovigilance, Anand has been at the forefront of implementing cutting-edge systems to enhance efficiency across all aspects of the field. He strongly emphasizes the importance of an integrated ecosystem for seamless information flow between case processing, signal detection, literature search, and submission systems. Anand was honored with the “All Star Award” for Innovation at the Breakthrough 2022 conference held in Boston in Oct 2022. He was also a speaker on practical implementation of AI in PV at the WDSC held in Boston in Oct 2023.

Hans van Leeuwen has over 20 years of experience in Regulatory Operations. He has managed global regulatory operations groups with responsibilities including regulatory information management, submission management, labeling, regulatory planning, change control and regulatory intelligence. On the IT side his experience includes global responsibility for (pre-) clinical, regulatory and pharmacovigilance systems such as clinical trial management, document management and adverse event reporting systems.
Hans has a strong interest in the use of data standards in regulatory submissions and has served on multiple representative committees promoting the use of standards in regulatory.
His previous employers include Organon Biosciences, Schering-Plough and MSD and he is currently at Astellas as head of RA Data & Systems Excellence. Prior to working in regulatory, Hans held management and research positions in multiple disciplines including analytical chemistry, statistics and data analysis. Hans holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry.

Claudia Lehmann serves as Vice President of Global Patient Safety and Pharmacovigilance Operations & Systems for Boehringer Ingelheim. Her passion lies in patient safety, process design and efficiency and breaking down complex situations into manageable pieces that can be addressed in an agile and comprehensible way, never losing sight of the overall purpose of the task and the big picture. Prior to this role, she was leading Biostatistics and Data Management Europe within Boehringer Ingelheim.
Claudia has been trained in medical information management at an affiliation of the University of Ulm, Germany.

Dr. Franziska Rathjens is a pharmacist and holds a Master’s and doctoral degree in Molecular Medicine. She joined B. Braun Melsungen AG in 2019 as a Deputy Qualified Person for Pharmacovigilance and Deputy Local Safety Officer for Germany.
After initiating and managing the establishment of new and improvement of existing processes from 2020 to 2022 within B. Braun’s Global Pharmacovigilance & Patient Safety Department, she built and now leads a team responsible for Business Process Management & Pharmacovigilance Tools. This team is in charge of the applications used in pharmacovigilance at B. Braun, especially of the pharmacovigilance database Lifesphere Multivigilance. In close collaboration with the teams responsible for case processing, periodic safety reporting and signal management automations have and are being implemented to bring value to the business users.

Andrea Rogers leads the Digital, Technology, and Innovation (DTI) teams who provide technology solutions for Amgen’s Global Patient Safety, Global Development, and Global Medical organizations. Andrea has spent more than 30 years working in Information Technology supporting Healthcare, first working for payers within the US, and for the last 17+ years at Amgen.
During her tenure at Amgen, Andrea has held numerous roles of increasing scope and responsibility, including in Enterprise Technology groups focused on data and analytics, and for the past eight years in the R&D Informatics organization. In addition to her current role supporting Patient Safety, Development, and Medical, Andrea has also led the teams supporting Commercialization and Business Development. Andrea is the R&D technology integration lead for Amgen’s acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics and in 2024 will lead an effort to transform the technology ecosystem for Global Patient Safety. Andrea holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from UC Santa Cruz, and a Master of Arts from UC Davis.

Marina is a passionate, experienced, and motivated professional with over 13 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, particularly safety surveillance. Her expertise and experience in pharmacovigilance and quality activities, combined with her innovative thinking style and enthusiasm has helped many companies and departments propel through their transformation journeys. Her expertise are in process optimization and ensuring standards and compliance within the GVP guidelines. Marina holds a master’s degree in pharmaceutical sciences from Greenwich University and a bachelor’s degree in medical biochemistry from Brunel University.