Eric Marcusson is an experienced scientist and manager with an extensive background in preclinical drug discovery. Throughout his career he has helped to develop innovative technologies and approaches to identify genes that make effective targets for specific molecularly-targeted therapies and helped to drive these therapies into the clinic.
At Isis Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Marcusson led the preclinical discovery team that was responsible for progressing two drugs into the clinic for oncology indications. Importantly, he also co-led the team that built data packages that were able to deprioritize two drug candidates before clinical candidate nomination, thus saving the company millions of dollars in wasted expenses. He has worked on targets in the hedgehog, JAK/STAT, hypoxia, protein translation, cell cycle and apoptotic pathways.
Dr. Marcusson was also part of a small group that founded a biotechnology company, Regulus Therapeutics, that was built around oligonucleotide therapeutics and a new discovery in biology, microRNA. Dr. Marcusson helped the company progress through a successful IPO. He has experience with microRNA, antisense oligonucleotides, siRNA, long noncoding RNAs and ribozymes for drug discovery, target validation and functional genomics.
In 2013, Dr. Marcusson founded his own consulting company and has been advising biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies in the area of RNA therapeutics as well as doing technology evaluation for venture capital and other financial firms on companies in the oncology and RNA therapeutics fields.
Dr. Marcusson has been invited to give presentations at multiple international conferences (conference list) and has published extensively in the area of RNA therapeutics (publication list). He is a co-inventor on more than 50 patents and patent applications. He currently serves as the CSO of Providence Therapeutics, but is still available for consulting jobs which do not present a conflict of interest.