John E. Scott is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Principal Investigator at the BRITE research institute at North Carolina Central University. His research interests are focused on triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) with regards to the discovery of novel targets, drugs, drug combinations and drug repurposing, with the goal of identifying new treatment options for this disease. He also has a general interest in academic drug/probe discovery. His role within the READDI-AViDD Center is to lead the assay validation and high throughput screening of compound collections at BRITE’s High Throughput Screening Core facility.
John earned a BS in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign followed by a Ph.D. in Microbiology & Immunology from Duke University. As a graduate student at Duke University, his research focused on the mechanism of tumor cell recognition and lysis by NK cells. As a postdoctoral researcher at The Upjohn Company, he studied signal transduction requirements for T cell activation. John has over seven years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry in early phase drug discovery and developing assays for HTS. As a scientist at Helios Pharmaceuticals, he developed biochemical and cell-based assays, taking projects from gene to compound screening with a validated assay. At Eli Lilly & Co., his research focused on drug discovery by leading high throughput assay development and screening and providing scientific leadership for screening campaigns. He was an active member of Lilly’s kinase-focused drug discovery program and directed the development and validation of 17 kinase assays for a variety of kinase targets. After leaving Lilly, he was hired at NCCU as an Associate Professor and initiated his academic research.