Johnna Wesley's Biography

Johnna Wesley, Vice President, Global Drug Discovery for T1D & CKD, Novo Nordisk

Johnna D. Wesley, MPH, Ph.D., is the Vice President of Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) and Chronic Kidney Disease research at Novo Nordisk. Dr. Wesley and her team, based both in the USA and in Denmark, work on finding curative or preventative therapies for T1D and chronic kidney disease. This work involves characterization of the disease pathology in humans; translational biomarkers for predicting drug responses and disease outcomes; and novel in vitro platform development for screening compounds and mechanistic studies. Dr. Wesley holds a Master of Public Health degree, specializing in epidemiology, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a doctorate in Medical Science/Immunology from Brown University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Benaroya Research Institute before joining the clinical immunology group at Dendreon, a biotech company focused on personalized cellular therapy for cancer. Dr. Wesley moved to Novo Nordisk in 2012 to initially work in T1D research and translational biomarker development. Then, in 2017, she her research focus broaden to include kidney disease and other cardiometabolic diseases. In 2022, she became the head of research for two therapeutic areas, T1D and kidney disease.