Dr. Egon Koch finished studies in agricultural sciences and veterinary medicine and is a State Veterinary Association approved Expert in Pharmacology and Toxicology. He did his PhD thesis at the Institute of Animal Reproduction and Animal Behaviour of the Federal Agricultural Research Center (FAL) in Neustadt/Hannover (Germany) and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Animal Physiology of the Agricultural and Food Research Council in Cambridge (UK) working on the maternal recognition of pregnancy and immunological aspects of reproduction. After returning to the FAL, he established his own research group in the field of reproductive immunology, before taking over the position of Group Leader for Inflammation and Immunopharmacology in the Department of Pharmacology of Dr. Willmar Schwabe Pharmaceuticals (Karlsruhe, Germany) in 1988. In 2003, he became Head of the Department of Pharmacology and since 2005 is Head of Preclinical Research. Dr. Koch has extensive research experience in the pharmacological and toxicological evaluation of herbal medicinal products, isolated plant constituents and synthetic compounds. Besides his main professional interests in pharmacology (e.g. inflammation- and immunopharmacology, central nervous and cardiovascular diseases as well as metabolic and endocrine disorders) and toxicology, he covers a range of other areas including cultivation of medicinal plants and phytochemistry. He is a member of the German Society for Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, the German Society for Immunology as well as the Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research, regularly reviews publication manuscripts and is member in the editorial board of several scientific journals.