MATTHEW DUCHARS

Chief Executive Officer, Vaccines Manufacturing & Innovation Centre

Matthew is an executive with over 30 years of experience in biotechnology and prior to joining the Vaccines Centre in 2019 he was the president of Genie BioLogic LLC a company specialising in providing strategic direction and technical advice for the development of medical countermeasures in the US. Before 2018, he spent three years as a VP Product Development for Emergent Biosolutions, three years at United Therapeutics focused on developing host based antiviral small molecule drugs, five years as a Chief Scientific Officer initially for Avecia Vaccines and then for PharmAthene, when they purchased the vaccine business in 2008.

Matthew has worked on a wide variety of vaccine and therapeutic platforms as well as medical countermeasures, for multiple indications including Anthrax, Plague, Ebola, Smallpox, Marburg, Dengue, Zika, Radiation and Chemical agents. He has led the development of multiple biopharmaceutical products from pre-IND laboratory stages through GMP scale up, to their final validation at a commercial operating scale. His experience extends into the development of human clinical and animal model data for the licensure of products, using both conventional and the animal rule path, and has been an invited speaker at both biopharmaceutical and FDA-sponsored conferences and workshops. Dr Duchars earned a BS in microbiology and a PhD in microbial physiology from the University of Sheffield.