John Higgins
Senior Director
MSD
USA
Biography
John received a BS in biochemistry from Albright College and his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from Brown University. After completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in NYC in the departments of Positron Emission Tomography and Neurology, he joined the Medicinal Chemistry Discovery group at Johnson Matthey Biomedical. There he worked on Pt-based antitumor drugs and peptide-based diagnostic radio-imaging agents. After nearly a decade in drug Discovery, he later moved on to drug development, in positions of increasing responsibility at J&J and Sanofi-Aventis. For the past 15 years he and his teams have specialized in drug delivery and pharmaceutics, focused at the interface of drug discovery and development. His specific expertise in drug delivery lies in the area of enhancing the solubility of insoluble compounds, where he has successfully introduced a wide range of methods into drug discovery space. His research also spans specific areas such as targeted prodrugs and new functional excipients. He currently is a Senior Principal Scientist and Network Technology Lead of the Discovery Pharmaceutical Sciences department at Merck Research Labs. He is co-inventor on 13 US Patents and author of many diverse publications and book chapters in the fields of organic, solid state & medicinal chemistry as well as drug delivery.
Research Interest
Organic, solid state & medicinal chemistry and drug delivery