Dr. Rana Rais

Dr Rana Rais, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Director of the drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics group of Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery Program, Dr. Rais was granted a Research Science Regulatory (RSR) fellowship at US FDA to evaluate the biopharmaceutic properties of new molecular entities from new drug applications. Dr. Rais received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences with substantial experience in biopharmaceutics, drug transport, metabolism, pharmacokinetics, and drug delivery. Specifically, Dr. Rais has developed and implemented methods to study the in vitro and in vivo and pharmacokinetics of novel chemical entities. Also a major focus of her lab has been evaluating drug delivery strategies specifically prodrug approaches for compounds with poor physicochemical properties such as poor solubility and poor permeability. Examples of such compounds include anticancer agents as well as hydrophilic molecules with multiple charges which show poor penetration to biological membranes.  Lastly, she and her lab are highly skilled in conducting bioanalysis of challenging molecules in different biological matrices especially those that cannot be analyzed by simple reverse phase chromatography.