Eva Rohde is Head of the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the University Hospital of the Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg, Austria. She received her M.D. from the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria in 1994, finished training in Transfusion Medicine in 2005 and spent several years in stem cell research as a postdoctoral fellow. Her research focuses on the application of mesenchymal stromal cell-based therapies with special emphasis on their extracellular vesicles (MSC-EVs). She is Director and Qualified Person of the GMP Unit in Salzburg which has achieved the pharmaceutical manufacturing authorization for MSC and MSC-EVs in 2015 and participated a clinical trial testing MSCs in multiple sclerosis. Recent effort is directed towards the preclinical characterization and the regulatory requirements for the clinical assessment and future application of stem-cell based products, including stromal cell-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs). In vitro and in vivo potency assays to define the immunomodulatory, neuroprotective, neuroregenerative and scarless healing support of MSC-EVs are currently developed. Since 2019 Eva Rohde chairs the ISEV – Task Force on Regulatory Affairs and Clinical Use of EV-based Therapeutics https://www.isev.org/rigor-standardization .
Eva Rohde is involved in activities that consolidate nanovesicular therapeutics in Salzburg (CONSONANT). Recently, she joined the newly founded Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Nanovesicular Precision Medicine (LBI NVPM) in Salzburg (https://nvpm.lbg.ac.at/ ).
The Science-Medical-Public Liaison program at the LBI NVPM, organized by Eva Rohde aims to promote the clinical evaluation of Nanovesicular Therapeutics (NVT) by building a bridge between patients’ needs, the opportunities and challenges of clinical research, legal requirements and the broader society. The growing interest in extracellular vesicles (EV) and other nanovesicular modalities as novel therapeutic entities underscores the need for increased pre-clinical and clinical investigations, standardization, and interdisciplinary coordination of NVT drug development efforts.
