Barbara Slusher, M.A.S., Ph.D., leads a 20-member veteran drug discovery team of medicinal chem...ists, assay developers, pharmacologists, toxicologists and pharmacokinetic/drug metabolism experts, who identify novel drug targets arising from JHU faculty’s research and translate them into new, small molecule drug therapies.

Her team collaborates extensively with faculty at the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and leads the BKI immunotherapy drug discovery core, aimed at developing new immune-targeting drug therapies for laboratory and clinical testing at Johns Hopkins.
view more

Zheng’s research focuses on two R01-funded projects; first, the group has developed a pancreati...c cancer immunotherapy research program on a neoadjuvant therapy platform as well as a number of preclinical models of pancreatic cancer for developing innovative immunotherapy strategies. The group has applied the knowledge gained from pancreatic cancer immune-based therapies to the development of a colorectal cancer GVAX vaccine. Second, the group is aimed at understanding the mechanistic roles of the tumor microenvironment in cancer development and metastasis and identifying new targets for pancreatic cancer therapies by dissecting the tumor microenvironment of pancreatic cancer. view more