Considerations for Modality Selection in Neurological Disease Drug Development

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

2:30 PM-4:00 PM

BIOMED Seminar

Title:
Considerations for Modality Selection in Neurological Disease Drug Development
    
Speaker:
Krista J. Spiller, PhD
Associate Director
Neuroscience Discovery
Johnson & Johnson

Details:
Gene therapies promise life-saving medicines, but their uptake has been slow and recent investments in the modality and supporting technologies have lagged across the biopharmaceutical industry. Dr. Spiller will offer her perspective on the realities of gene therapy drug development (especially for prevalent diseases), and offer examples of work from her group at Johnson & Johnson (J&J). Finally, she’ll discuss the J&J Precision Medicine framework for target identification, patient identification, target modulation, and therapeutic focus in the context of both neuropsychiatry and neurodegeneration.

Biosketch:
Krista Spiller, PhD, is an Associate Director in Neuroscience Discovery at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and a member of the Neuroscience Therapeutic Area’s Biology Leadership team. Krista also serves as a project/biology lead on drug development programs for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Prior to joining J&J in 2018, Krista was a research faculty member at Penn Medicine in the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, where she studied how motor circuitry is impacted by ALS-related pathology and investigated how to mitigate these effects using adeno-associated virus (AAV) and antisense oligonucleotide therapeutic approaches.

Krista earned her undergraduate degree at Swarthmore College and went on to obtain her PhD in Neurobiology & Behavior at Columbia University in New York in the laboratory of Christopher Henderson, specifically focusing on factors that make motor neurons vulnerable to ALS. Krista also completed postdoctoral training with Dr. Virginia Lee at the University of Pennsylvania, working on the development and characterization of TDP-43-based mouse models. She has over 25 peer-reviewed publications and patents or patent applications. Perhaps most importantly, she is the twin sister of Professor Kara Spiller, with whom she collaborates extensively, though usually on matters of Christmas gift selection, restaurant reservations, and other miscellany.

Contact Information

Carolyn Riley
cr63@drexel.edu