PKD Foundation names new chief scientific officer

The PKD Foundation has named a new Chief Scientific Officer, who will be joining the PKD Foundation on Feb. 9, 2015. David Baron, PhD, will be leading the foundation's work in research toward finding treatments and a cure.

Baron is particularly interested in the Foundation's work because he and has PKD, as well as several family members. Baron received a kidney transplant in 2009. Also, his main research focus has been the movement of electrolytes and water across normal and abnormal epithelia.

Baron joins the PKD Foundation us out of retirement from Takeda Global Research and Development in 2013. During his retirement, he traveled and served as a legal and regulatory expert witness in toxicology and pharmacology, which he has done since 1989. Baron was with Takeda since 2001, where he began as their first U.S. Director of Toxicology and most recently was vice president of Nonclinical Safety and Risk Evaluation for the U.S. and European Union.

Other roles he had prior to Takeda include Senior Science Fellow for Global Toxicology with Pharmacia and increasing positions of responsibility with Searle/Monsanto, becoming a Monsanto Science Fellow in Metabolism and Safety Evaluation. At Searle, he was head of quantitative light and electron microscopy. He also represented Safety Assessment on drug development teams. Earlier in his career, he was on the faculty of the Medical University of South Carolina.

With an NIH grant, he founded the Core Structure-Function Laboratory in the Department of Pharmacology. Baron received his B.A. in Biology and Ph.D. in Anatomy from The University of Chicago. His did his postdoctoral fellowship in pathology and pharmacology at the Medical University of South Carolina. He has been a grant reviewer for the National Cancer Institute, given invited seminars and has served on several national scientific boards.