John A. Tucker, Ph.D., Associate
John A. Tucker, Ph.D. is a medicinal chemist with 16 years experience conducting industrial drug discovery projects in diabetes, multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, central nervous system disorders, cancer, and HIV infection. His expertise includes biomedical technology assessment, drug discovery research strategy and risk evaluation, research collaboration management, and the design and implementation of effective research outsourcing strategies. John's scientific endeavors have led to 11 U.S. patents, over 30 U.S. patent applications, and 18 articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
John joined Katan Associates in 2007. Prior to this, he served as Director of Medicinal Chemistry at ChemBridge Research Laboratories (CRL). His responsibilities at CRL included leading an international team of scientists pursuing novel approaches to the treatment of HIV infection, cancer, and CNS disorders, managing relationships with company clients and strategic research partners, and leading business development efforts for the company's chemistry services business.
From 1999 - 2003 John was a Principal Scientist in the Chemical Sciences group at Elan Pharmaceuticals. His role at Elan included building and leading Elan's High Throughput Medicinal Chemistry group, leading the company's structure-based design efforts, and helping to manage a large Alzheimer's disease research collaboration with Pharmacia Corporation. Prior to joining Elan, John was a research scientist in the Medicinal Chemistry department at the Upjohn Company, where he contributed to the discovery of development candidates in diabetes, cytomegalovirus infection, and gram-(+) bacterial infections, and was an early champion of the use of small combinatorial chemistry libraries in lead development.
John received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from New College of Florida. He conducted his Ph.D. research under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate Donald J. Cram at UCLA. After completing his dissertation, John spent several years performing basic research in computational and synthetic chemistry as a postdoctoral research fellow in the groups of Kendall Houk at UCLA and Barry M. Trost at Stanford. Concurrently with his work with Katan Associates, John is pursuing the MBA degree at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
