Jon C. Mirsalis

Jon C. Mirsalis, Ph.D., DABT, has more than 35 years of experience in the management and conduct of preclinical development projects for the translation of pharmaceutical products, vaccines, and medical devices into human clinical trials. A large portion of his career has focused on accelerating development of therapies for infectious diseases and biothreat agents, including fast-tracking therapies for influenza, Ebola, plague, anthrax TB and drug-resistant bacteria.

Mirsalis joined SRI in 1981 as a staff scientist, and subsequently served as a program director, department director, laboratory director, associate director, and managing director. He currently serves as VP of SRI’s Translational Development Section, a 90-person group that is the largest contractor of preclinical services to the National Institutes of Health.

Mirsalis has a broad background in drug development and has personally been involved in the development of more than 70 therapeutics that have entered clinical trials. Approximately 15 have achieved market approval.  He has also published extensively in the areas of genetic toxicology, mechanisms of carcinogenesis, development of therapeutics for cancer and infectious disease, and use of transgenic animals; he is the author of more than 200 publications, book chapters, and abstracts.

Before joining SRI, Mirsalis was a postdoctoral fellow at the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, where he developed the in vivo-in vitro hepatocyte DNA repair assay, which is now used as a screen to identify potential carcinogens by government and industry. Mirsalis regularly lectures on drug development at the University of California-San Francisco, on global health at Notre Dame University and on biosecurity at Stanford University.  He recently completed two terms as Chair of the Board of Directors of the California Biomedical Research Association and in 2020 he joined the Board of the National Association of Biomedical Research.  He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Critical Path Institute’s Predictive Safety Testing Consortium (PSTC) and the Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC).  He has previously served on the Board of Scientific Councilors for the National Toxicology Program and the FDA’s Over-the-Counter Product Review Committee.

Mirsalis received his B.S. degree in zoology/molecular biology from Kent State University, his M.S. degree in genetics from North Carolina State University, and holds Ph.D. degrees in toxicology and genetics from North Carolina State University. He has been certified by the American Board of Toxicology since 1983.

He was named an SRI Fellow in 2014.