October 6, 2017

Alzheimer’s Disease and genomic research – global pharmaceutical research perspective

Compared to academics it’s rare for senior scientists in pharma companies to engage with journalists. Yet government and leaders of science repeatedly tell us that the future of medicine will emerge from more and more collaborations between industry and academia.  The SMC’s Expert Encounters are a good opportunity to invite leading scientists from overseas to drop by and meet UK based Journalists to share their perspectives on the rapidly changing medical research environment so we have invited Jim Sullivan, vice president for Discovery at Abbvie to join us.

Building on Sally Davies’s vision for integrating genomics into every aspect of the NHS, Dr. Sullivan can discuss some of the latest genomics and population-based genomic analysis is starting to play in understanding the genetic determinants of Alzheimer’s disease. He will demonstrate through the examples of close global collaborations across public institutions and academia are the way society is going to realize the potential as genomic knowledge is being converted into applied science. Dr. Sullivan can also discuss why now is an exciting moment in research for Neurodegenerative Diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Speaker:

Dr Jim Sullivan, Vice president for Discovery at AbbVie, has advanced more than 100 compounds into clinical development across a number of disease states including recently approved medicines for the treatment of cancer and hepatitis C. He has authored or co-authored more than 130 scientific publications and is an inventor on 11 patents. He is an adjunct professor in the department of pharmacology at Northwestern University and is on the board of a number of companies and foundations including Calimmune, Alector, Regis Technologies, Accelerator, BIO, MATTER and C2ST.  Dr. Sullivan earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin and conducted post-doctoral research at Northwestern University.