Dr. Michael Hutton Eli Lilly, USA

Dr. Hutton is Vice President of Neurodegeneration Research at Eli Lilly, where he is responsible for drug discovery in AD and related neurodegenerative conditions across all Eli Lilly sites. Prior to this, Dr. Hutton was Lilly’s Chief Scientific Officer heading neurodegenerative disease drug discovery (2009) and Lilly’s UK Neuroscience leader... read more(2012). At Lilly, Dr. Hutton has been responsible for AD strategy development and for the delivery of Lilly’s discovery and early phase (to Phase 2) portfolio. Dr. Hutton had also served as Senior Director at Merck, where he focused on drug development for tau-based targets. Before the move to industry, Dr Hutton’s lab focused on AD and related dementias. He was appointed a full Professor of Neuroscience at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in 2003.

In 1998, Dr Hutton’s lab identified genetic mutations in MAPT (tau) in patients with FTD. This work determined the cause of the disease and demonstrated that tau dysfunction is sufficient to cause neurodegeneration. Dr Hutton received the Potamkin and MetLife prizes for his work on tau while at the Mayo Clinic.

In 2006, Dr Hutton’s group at the Mayo Clinic identified mutations in Progranulin, a gene that also causes FTD. In 2014, Forum Pharma entered a therapeutic agent into clinical trials specifically to treat patients with progranulin haploinsufficiency. The development of this and similar potential FTD therapeutics were entirely dependent on this genetic discovery in Dr Hutton’s laboratory.
Dr. Hutton obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1993 under the supervision of Eric Barnard. He started work as a postdoctoral scientist working for Professor John Hardy on the genetics of AD in 1994.