Dr. Kanneboyina Nagaraju is an expert on translational research in autoimmune and genetic muscle diseases. He has authored more than 120-refereed publications, along with several textbook chapters on autoimmune muscle diseases. Immediately after completing his PhD from Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, India, he came to the United States to do a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD.
Apart from identifying pathogenic pathways and drug targets in these neuromuscular disorders, he has also pioneered the generation of novel inducible transgenic and knockout mouse models for muscle and neuromuscular diseases. Early drug screening efforts in his laboratory in collaboration with Eric Hoffman and John McCall led to the identification of powerful anti-inflammatory, membrane stabilizing dissociated glucocorticoids. His group has demonstrated that these dissociated steroids are highly efficacious in several inflammatory disease models. The lead compound, vamorolone has been in clinical trials for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Nagaraju has co-founded two biotech companies, ReveraGen BioPharma, a biotech company focused on developing dissociated glucocorticoid therapies for inflammatory diseases including muscular dystrophy, and AGADA BioSciences, a preclinical drug screening and phenotyping company to facilitate development of therapeutics for rare neuromuscular diseases
Nagaraju currently serves as a member of medical and scientific advisory boards of the Myositis Association, Muscular Dystrophy Association and Cure Duchenne, as well as on the editorial boards of several specialty journals. Additionally, he is one of the founding core preclinical experts on the TREAT-NMD Advisory Committee for Therapeutics.