G. Sitta Sittampalam, PhD

Senior Advisor to the Director, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health

Dr. Sittampalam is a Senior Advisor to the Director and Project Manager in the division of Therapeutics for Rare & Neglected Diseases Program (TRND), which is part of the National Center for Advancing Translational Therapeutics (NCATS) at the NIH. His current responsibilities include multiple project and alliance management in TRND and NCATS, promoting promising drug candidates from academia for rare and neglected diseases to the clinic, and expanding The Learning Collaborative (TLC) concept developed at NCATS, The University of Kansas Cancer Center and the Leukemia Lymphoma Society. Dr. Sittampalam has over 23 years of experience in drug discovery and development in the pharmaceutical industry (Eli Lilly & Co, Indianapolis, IN), and served 4 years in academic drug discovery and high throughput screening as the Deputy Director of the Institute of Advancing Medical Innovations, and was a professor of Pharmacology, Toxicology & Therapeutics at the University of Kansas Cancer Center. Kansas City, KS (2007-2011). His current interests are in developing physiologically relevant 3D cellular models for cancer drug discovery and circulating tumor cells & cancer stem cells as biomarkers. He was a member of NIH RoadMap MLPCN Grants Review Panels (2005-2009) and has served on stem cell research grant review panels in Maryland (MSCRF) and California (CIRM). He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Assay Guidance Manual, sponsored by NCATS and NIMH and published as an e-Book on the NCBI website, a division of the National Library of Medicine, editorial board of the Journal of Biomolecular Sciences (2007-present) and the scientific advisory boards of Science Translational Medicine, Science Exchange Inc., and Stemina Biomarker Discovery, Inc.

Learn more about Dr. Sittampalam’s research at PubMed.