Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease: Safety of Blood and Plasma Products

By Sonja Lenz, Study Director, Klaus Kellings, Business Development Regional Manager, and Helga Siakkou, Quality Control Manager, at NewLab BioQuality AG

Sonja Lenz has been Study Director for prion studies at NewLab BioQuality AG since 2001. She studied Chemical Engineering at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences in Krefeld, and at NewLab she was responsible for establishing and validating the Western blots used in these studies.

Sonja has also performed several GLP-compliant studies whose results have been presented at various international meetings.

Dr Klaus Kellings works in the Business Development department at NewLab BioQuality AG. Prior to this position, he acted as Study Director for Virology at NewLab, responsible for viral and prion process validation studies. He gained experience in prion research during his studies in Biophysics at the University of Dьsseldorf and his post-doctoral research at the University of California in San Francisco. This experience has been invaluable in establishing the prion techniques used at NewLab.

Dr Helga Siakkou is currently Quality Control Manager at NewLab. She obtained her degree in Biochemistry at the State University of Kharkov, Ukraine, and a PhD in Molecular Biology and Virology from the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Germany. Her research interests lie primarily in the area of retrovirus research. Helga has worked at NewLab BioQuality AG since 1994.