Professor of Neurology (primary), Psychiatry, Pharmacology, Neuroscience, Medicine, Oncology; Director, Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery; Vice Director, Pederson Brain Science Institute; Co-Director, JH Center for the Advancement of HIV Neurotherapeutics
Before joining Johns Hopkins in 2010, Dr. Slusher spent 18 years in the pharmaceutical industry, including several years at the level of Senior Vice President of Research and Translational Development. She has extensive experience in drug discovery through early clinical development and was involved in the successful development, launch and/or post marketing support of several branded medicines including SeroquelTM, AloxiTM, DacogenTM, LucedraTM.
At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Slusher leads the largest integrated drug discovery program on campus with a veteran team of medicinal chemists, assay developers, pharmacologists, toxicologists, and pharmacokinetics/drug metabolism experts. The team is engaged in identifying novel drug targets arising from the faculty’s research and translating them into new drug therapies for clinical development.
Dr. Slusher has published over 170 scientific articles and is the inventor on 75 patents and applications. She has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international scientific meetings and has served on the board or as a scientific consultant of multiple biotechnology companies. She is a co-founder of Cerecor, a CNS-focused biopharma company in Baltimore (www.cerecor.com/) and recently founded Dracen Pharmaceuticals focused on immuno-metabolism. She also founded and is leading the first-ever International Consortium of Academic Drug Discovery (www.addconsortium.org) with over 140 university-led translational centers and 1500 members in an effort to coordinate and enhance academic drug discovery efforts.