David Robinson

David Robinson joined the foundation in 2017 as deputy director, CMC Vaccines Development and Surveillance. He and his team work with internal and external partners to develop and execute CMC strategies and harness advances in science and technology that enable vaccine development to save lives in developing countries.

David has 25 years experience in global vaccine and biologics product commercialization, process development, and CMC regulatory strategy and execution. He worked at Sandoz and Schering-Plough but spent the majority of his career at Merck & Co, Inc. During his career at Merck, David held VP positions leading the Bioprocess R&D, Biologics Project Leadership, and the CMC Regulatory groups. In this latter role, he supported the development of the regulatory strategy that led to the approval of multiple products, including Gardasil-9, an anti-C. difficile toxin B antibody, Zinplava™, a follow on biologic to Lantus, Lusduna™, a novel wet-dry autoinjector, and two allergy treatment tablets. David also chaired the CMC development team that achieved approval of RotaTeq, headed the product development teams that entered Merck’s first antibody and first biosimilar into clinical studies, and led the CMC regulatory group that gained approval of the first anti-PD1immunooncology mab in the US, Keytruda. Both RotaTeq and Keytruda won Prix Galien Awards as the best biotechnology products for their respective years.

David “retired” from Merck in 2015 and spent two years consulting for over a dozen clients, including the foundation, on their vaccines and biologics process development plans and CMC regulatory strategy. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from U.C. Berkeley, his Ph.D. from MIT, and did his postdoctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH).