As Global Head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS (JLABS), Melinda Richter fosters the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies external R&D engine and supports the innovation community by creating capital-efficient commercialization models that give early stage companies a big company advantage.
By providing infrastructure, services, educational programs and networks in global hotspots, JLABS is the best place to start a company working in healthcare, with a specific emphasis on Johnson & Johnson’s sectors: consumer, medical device and pharmaceuticals.
Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease and ALS affect millions of people worldwide. [1] Despite a significant number of clinical failures in recent years, the search for new treatments that can slow or stop progression of neurodegenerative diseases continues to be an active area of pursuit by the research and pharma communities. While much of the effort in drug development has centered on well-known disease pathologies (e.g. amyloid and tau for AD), advances in genetics, imaging, and biomarkers has led to a deeper understanding of disease pathophysiology and opened up new approaches to therapeutic development. Furthermore, as we start to uncover the molecular underpinnings of these diseases it has become clear that diseases that have historically been viewed as distinct, may indeed share common disease pathways and mechanisms. These advances have already had a significant impact on the research directed towards novel treatments, as well as how we design and execute clinical trials.  Collaborative networks in genomic research, multidisciplinary approaches to diagnosis and the necessity to reduce the risk of drug development are all shaping new therapeutic approaches and new business models.
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This program will delve into what we are learning from genomics, imaging and biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases, and how this information is shaping how we define these diseases and seek to develop new treatments. You will also hear from startups active in the neurodegenerative disease space and how they are building value while navigating uncertainty.
[1] http://www.neurodegenerationresearch.eu/about/what/
Eric is Senior Director of Neuroscience Innovation at the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center, Boston. Eric has more than 23 years of drug discovery and development experience with an extensive background in the biology and pharmacology of CNS disorders.
Eric received a BA in Biology from Colgate University and a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He went on to do postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rockefeller University prior to initiating a career in the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Rogaeva’s graduate degree (1983) and PhD in Biochemistry (1988) were obtained at Moscow State University. For the past 27 years, Dr. Rogaeva has been doing research at the Tanz Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases, University of Toronto. She contributed to 300 peer-reviewed papers, many of which are focused on the genetic overlap between different neurodegenerative disorders and development of effective genetic testing (e.g. for Alzheimer’s Disease). More recently, Dr. Rogaeva’s lab has been investigating if the risk of these diseases could be linked to epigenetic events (e.g. DNA methylation).
Graham Collingridge is a member of the Faculty of 1000 and a former president of the British Neuroscience Association. He is a co winner of The Brain Prize 2016 - regarded as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for neuroscientists. This award recognises one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience. He studies synaptic plasticity, in particular long-term potentiation and long-term depression, in health and disease models.
Sandra Black, MD, FRCP(C) is an internationally renowned cognitive and stroke neurologist who holds the inaugural Brill Chair in Neurology, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. A leading clinical trialist in dementia, she is the current Executive Director of the Toronto Dementia Research Alliance, a multi institutional collaborative network of memory programs at the University of Toronto involving Baycrest, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, St. Michael’s Hospital, Sunnybrook HSC and Toronto Western Hospital, UHN. She is also the Sunnybrook Site Director of the Heart & Stroke Foundation Canadian Partnership for Stroke Recovery and the Hurvitz Brain Sciences Research Program Director at Sunnybrook Research Institute.She has earned numerous mentorship and research awards, and elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2012. In 2015 she received the U of T Faculty of Medicine Dean’s Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award and was appointed an Officer to the Order of Canada for her contributions to Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and vascular dementia.
