Justin Hanes, Ph.D. is the Lewis J. Ort Professor of Ophthalmology with joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Environmental Health Sciences, Neurosurgery, and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University. His degrees are in Chemical Engineering from UCLA (B.S.) and MIT (Ph.D.), and he has completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Oncology and Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins prior to beginning his faculty position in 1998. He is the Director of the Center for Nanomedicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also Director of Therapeutics for the Institute for NanoBioTechnology (INBT), which includes more than 170 faculty members and spans several divisions of the university.
Dr. Hanes is a global leader of research at the interface of nanotechnology and medicine. He is known for designing and synthesizing new biodegradable plastics, with which his research group creates nanoscopic, drug-filled particles capable of targeted and sustained delivery to specific sites in the body. He is an inventor on more than 20 patent families relating to controlled/sustained drug delivery methods. Products based on his drug delivery inventions have been tested in various clinical trials, through and including Phase III. He is the lead founder and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Kala Pharmaceuticals, a company backed by three premiere venture capital groups. Kala is commercializing Dr. Hanes’ laboratory’s “mucus penetrating particle” drug delivery invention. Dr. Hanes serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for Genentech in the Drug Delivery Division, as a frequent advisor to industry, and as an advisor to government agencies, such as the NIH. Dr. Hanes currently serves as the Principal Investigator on numerous grants from the NIH and other agencies. He directs a laboratory at Johns Hopkins with approximately 50 people under his supervision. He is currently the Associate Editor for Drug Delivery and Translational Research, a official journal of the Controlled Release Society, and has served as Associate Editor for the International Journal of Nanomedicine, Associate Editor for Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine, and as an Editorial Board Member for both the Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology and Experimental Biology in Medicine.