High Pressure Water Mist on High-speed Trains

  • Specific requirements for high-speed trains 
  • New approach with thermal activated nozzle heads 
  • Advantages of the new approach 
  • Challenges of creating/developing such new approaches 

Roundtable discussions: two informal rotating 40-minute discussion sessions

Roundtable 1: Having it All: Sustainability, Resilience and Safely 

Elena Romanova, Global Business Manager – Land Transportation, Scott Bader

 

Roundtable 2 : Designing for Yesterday’s Fire? Rethinking Rail Station Fire Dynamics.

  • Exploration of how modern trains behave in fire scenarios and how to ensure our design assumptions keep pace. 
  • Are current fire size assumptions still valid for modern rolling stock? 
  • What testing and research are being done today in the rolling stock industry to determine the fire behaviour of modern trains? 
  • What is needed to formalise updated testing and feed it into standards and best practice in the fire industry? 

Lauren Teague, Fire Engineer, Mott Macdonald

Alice Pike, Fire Engineer, Mott Macdonald

 

Effective Fire Protection maintenance

  • What are the constraints preventing effective maintenance?
  • Maintenance stakeholders and their perspectives
  • The hierarchy of maintenance
  • Do we really know if our maintenance strategy is effective?
  • What does a “Young Engineer” need to know?

New alternate methods for clinical trials: Discussion of the use of human induced pluripotent stem cells for drug development

  • Overview of recent regulatory shifts (FDA Modernization Act 2.0, April 2025 FDA policy) enabling non-animal methods for oncology IND submissions.
  • Addressing tumor heterogeneity and efficacy challenges through isogenic iPSC-derived tumor models engineered with specific mutations (e.g., KRAS, TP53, EGFR) using CRISPR/Cas9, enabling precise assessment of variant effects.
  • Utilizing human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for predictive toxicology (e.g., CARTOX assays) and disease modeling to enhance safety assessments and clinical trial efficiency, particularly in small molecule and antibody-based therapies.
  • Employing differentiated iPSC-derived healthy tissue models (e.g., cardiomyocytes, hepatocytes, neurons) to evaluate off-tumor/on-target toxicities in CAR-T therapies, mitigating risks of unintended tissue damage.
  • Operational considerations, validation strategies, and practical lessons from developing scalable iPSC biobanks supporting New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) in oncology drug development.