Graham Johnson, PhD
Drug Discovery and Medicinal Chemistry Advisor
During a 42-year medicinal chemistry career, Dr. Johnson held a number of senior leadership positions in biotech and large pharmaceuticals. These roles included: Senior Vice President, Preclinical Development and Research for AVI BioPharma (now Sarepta Therapeutics), Chief Research buMyers Squibb Discovery Chemistry for Connecticut and Canada, and Director of Neuroscience Chemistry for Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Johnson has worked in such diverse areas as neuroscience, infectious and genitourinary diseases, inflammation and RNA therapeutics. He is an inventor on more than 73 US patents and has co-authored 73 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Johnson is currently President of NuPharmAdvise LLC, a drug discovery consulting practice that serves the medicinal chemistry needs of biotechnology companies, the National Institutes of Health, venture capital and intellectual property firms.
Since its inception, Dr. Johnson has been a medicinal chemistry consultant to the Blueprint Neurotherapeutics Network (BPN). Dr. Johnson co-founded two biotechnology companies, Oricula Therapeutics and iCura Vision and is currently Oricula’s Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Johnson received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland and then was a postdoc with Sir Jack Baldwin at Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) and with Sir Derek Barton at Imperial College, London and the Research Institute for Medicine and Chemistry in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
