Rana Rais, PhD

Rana Rais is an Associate Professor of Neurology and serves as a Director of the drug metabolism, pharmacokinetics (DMPK) and bioanalysis laboratory within Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery (JHDD) program.

Dr. Rais received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences with substantial experience in biopharmaceutics, drug permeability, drug transport, drug metabolism, pharmacokinetics, and drug delivery including prodrug design and characterization. She joined JHDD in 2010 and established a functional drug metabolism, pharmacokinetics (DMPK) and bioanalysis laboratory with multiple operational assays including in vitro chemical and metabolic stability, metabolite identification, aqueous solubility, protein binding, permeability assessments, and transporter assays in order to characterize new drug molecules. Her lab also has experience in conducting in vivo pharmacokinetic (PK) studies in multiple species (mouse, rat, swine, dog, primate) and developing bioanalytical methods (LC/MS/MS) in plasma and tissue matrices.  In addition, her lab has expertise in novel drug delivery approaches specifically intranasal delivery and prodrug approaches for successfully enhancing bioavailability and brain delivery of poorly soluble as we all as poorly permeable molecules. Using appropriate in vitro, in vivo, and in silico methods, her group has collaborated with multiple faculty at Johns Hopkins and  impacted drug discovery projects in Oncology, NeuroAIDS, Neuropathic pain, Inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s disease.