Lara Rosenberger is the Drug Metabolism and Disposition Highlighted Trainee Author for the July 2020 issue. She is a pre-doctoral trainee at Merck KGaA (Darmstadt, Germany) in collaboration with the Helmholtz-Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS). Ms. Rosenberger obtained her degree in pharmacy in 2017 at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. Her mentors are Dr. Lassina Badolo (Merck KGaA) and Prof. Dr. Rolf W. Hartmann (HIPS). The Drug Metabolism and Disposition article that earned her selection as a Highlighted Trainee Author is titled “Crystalline Sponges as a Sensitive and Fast Method for Metabolite Identification: Application to Gemfibrozil and its Phase I and II Metabolites” and is available at https://doi.org/10.1124/dmd.120.091140.

Ms. Rosenberger’s area of research is in the field of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK) and she is working on the complete structural elucidation of metabolites generated from in vitro incubations using the crystalline sponge method. By combining the fields of drug metabolism, chromatography, mass spectrometry, and crystallography, she implemented a workflow starting from in vitro incubations, sample preparation using semi-preparative HPLC purification, analysis of samples with LC-MS, and finally determination of structures in the crystalline sponges using single crystal X-ray diffraction. This method requires only nanogram amounts of analyte to gain structural information at the atomic level.

The anticipated impact of Ms. Rosenberger’s research will be in metabolite identification and aiding scientists in the investigation of human relevant metabolism at early stages in drug discovery and development where other analytical techniques are limited by their ability to provide information of the complete structure (LC-MS) or the requirement of larger amounts of material (NMR).

When not in the lab, Lara enjoys nature photography and hiking. She also likes to travel and explore other countries and cultures.