Robert B. Nelson

Dr. Nelson has over 24 years of experience in pharmaceutical drug discovery and development, including work on both small molecule and biologic drug candidates. Most recently, Dr. Nelson jointly established and built one of the first Neuroinflammation units in the industry, which served as a primary focus of US research by Lundbeck. He was on the US research management team responsible for design and execution of drug discovery strategy (2010-2015). He created and headed a research division that identified peripheral immune mechanisms acting across the blood-brain barrier to propagate multiple neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, small vessel disease (SVD), and progressive MS. Dr. Nelson was project lead on two academic/industrial collaborations pursuing biologics-based therapeutic candidates for AD and progressive MS, one with Dr. Katerina Akassoglou at the Gladstone Institutes, and the other with Dr. Dave Morgan at the USF Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute.

In conjunction with his responsibilities as Vice President, Exploratory Biology of MindImmune Therapeutics, Inc., Dr. Nelson is a Ryan Research Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island.

Prior to joining Lundbeck, Dr. Nelson was an Associate Research Fellow in the CNS Discovery group at Pfizer, Inc. (1991-2009). While at Pfizer, Dr. Nelson was leader on a project that nominated for clinical development a prototype nNOS inhibitor CP-601,073 for stroke and stroke recovery. Dr. Nelson was also the biology lead on a joint collaboration with TransTech Pharmaceuticals that resulted in the nomination of TTP-488, a RAGE antagonist currently in Phase III clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Nelson received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University (Neuroscience program/Department of Psychology) in 1987, and was a Freudenberger Research Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Huntington Potter at Harvard Medical School from 1989-1991, studying the role of CNS proteases in neurite outgrowth, astrocytic differentiation, and aberrant protein production/protein refolding.