Boehringer Mannheim

So we try to identify the disease by using diagnostic.

We had a small diagnostic division at the time, but 26 years ago, if I'm not mistaken, we acquired another family company, Boehringer Mannheim.

And Boehringer was then fully included into what Roche does.

And they were at the time the biggest in vitro diagnostic company.

Then I passed three years, uh, as a researcher in virology, and then I went through diff- four different companies in Europe.

The first one was Boehringer Mannheim, then Servier in France, Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, and finally, I went to Pfizer in Ambroise in France, where I headed the Department of Toxicology, and I was the European representative of Pfizer Toxicology.

Um, the role of the toxicologist is obviously to avoid that any new compound gets on the market, uh, which could have shown, um, side effects in animals.

So the toxicologist mostly, at least in pharmaceutical industry, works with animals in order to show whether they are safe or not from the perspective of, um, their action in, in animals.