James E. Audia

Biography

Dr. Jim Audia currently serves as Executive Director of the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, a collaborative effort of Northwestern University, The University of Chicago and The University of Illinois-Chicago, focused on enhancing biomedical innovation in the greater Chicago area. He joined the CBC after a nearly seven-year tenure as Constellation Pharmaceuticals’ chief scientific officer, where he oversaw the successful evolution of the company’s R&D efforts from a strong scientific base to a robust portfolio of clinical-stage assets and pre-clinical programs. Dr. Audia had joined Constellation in January 2011 following a highly productive career in drug discovery at Eli Lilly and Company. He held several key leadership roles during his 23-year tenure at Lilly. As a Distinguished Lilly Scholar, the highest level of the company’s scientific ladder, he made seminal technical and strategic contributions to the Lilly drug pipeline. Over the course of his career, Dr. Audia’s scientific work has contributed to more than 17 development candidates, including transformative contributions to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease through his discovery of both the first gamma secretase inhibitor and an industry-leading beta secretase inhibitor. Dr. Audia is a named inventor on more than 100 issued U.S. patents and has published and presented extensively. He received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of South Carolina and did postdoctoral training at Yale University before joining Lilly. Dr. Audia currently serves as a scientific advisor for Sage Therapeutics, Ribon Therapeutics, and the Tau Consortium of the Rainwater Foundation. 

Research Interest

Constellation Pharmaceuticals is the first biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of novel therapeutics in the emerging field of Epigenetics, a new field of science which is focused on selective regulators of epigenetic function, which are critical to controlling gene expression.