Dr. Priyanka Banerjee

Dr. Priyanka Banerjee is a Junior Group Leader and Principal Investigator at the Institute of Physiology's Structural Bioinformatics Group, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, where she also holds a lecturer appointment at Freie Universität Berlin. Her group is partially funded by the DFG Clinical Research Unit for computational food allergy prediction.

With over 15 years of experience in computer-aided drug discovery, cheminformatics, toxicology, and predictive science, Priyanka's research is centered on patient-centric drug discovery, integrating theoretical and computational methods with real-world experimental data to assess the risk-benefit profiles of therapeutics. Her work aims to bridge the gap between computational models and clinical reality, improving the precision and efficacy of drug development.

Her current research spans two major directions: developing computational models to predict food allergies, and conducting Real-World Evidence (RWE)-based analyses for drug and biological toxicity assessment. Driven by a passion for computational toxicology and predictive science, Priyanka is committed to advancing safer, more effective therapeutic interventions for patients.

Among her key scientific contributions, Priyanka conceived and developed ProTox, a widely used computational tool for predicting small-molecule toxicity, as part of her doctoral and post-doctoral research. Since its release, ProTox has become an established resource in the computational toxicology community, cited more than 6,000 times in the scientific literature and used by researchers worldwide to support early, in silico identification of toxicity liabilities in drug discovery and chemical safety assessment.