Varghese John, PhD

Dr. John is an accomplished medicinal chemist and leads the Drug Discovery Laboratory (DDL) at the Department of Neurology at UCLA. Dr. John is a member of the Alzheimer's Disease Program in the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer's Disease. The DDL team consists of scientists and skilled technicians with basic science and drug development experience who have joined the lab to find effective, safe therapeutics for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The DDL team identifies preclinical candidates and then establishes partnerships to progress these therapeutic agents from bench to bedside. Previously Dr. John was with Athena Neurosciences and Elan Pharmaceuticals for 18 years where he led a team of medicinal chemists developing drugs for central nervous system (CNS) diseases with a focus on AD. His work at Elan led to clinical candidates that went into advanced human trials. Dr. John is an inventor on over 100 pending or issued patents on compounds and analogs for CNS related targets.