Steven Projan - F1000 Section Head (since 05 May 2006)
Sr. V.P. R&D, Innovative Medicines Head of Infectious Diseases & Vaccines, MedImmune, LLC., Gaithersburg, MA, USA
BIOGRAPHY
Steven J Projan, Ph.D. is Sr. V.P. R&D, Innovative Medicines and Head of Infectious Diseases & Vaccines at MedImmune, a vertically integrated biotechnology company, headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland and wholly owned by AstraZeneca. The company is focused on infection, oncology, respiratory disease and inflammation, cardiovascular/gastrointestinal disease and neuroscience.Prior to this, Dr. Projan was the Global Head of Infectious Diseases at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. Prior to joining NIBR in September of 2008, he was Vice President and Head of Biological Technologies, at Wyeth Research.
Dr. Projan received a an S.B. from M.I.T. (1974) and earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Columbia University in 1980 (also earning M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from that institution) under Jim Wechsler, developing the first in vitro system that initiated chromosomal DNA replication from the E. coli origin of replication. He then became a postdoctoral fellow and later an Associate Member at the Public Health Research Institute, where he continued his work on plasmid replication, antibiotic resistance, and staphylococcal virulence in collaboration with Richard Novick. In 1987 Dr. Projan also became a senior scientist and then group leader at Applied Microbiology Inc., working on antimicrobial enzymes and bacteriocins. There he developed a protein-based method for the prevention of bovine mastitis and a protein-expression system for the production of an anti-staphylococcal protein that is soon to enter clinical trials. At the end of 1993, he moved to Lederle Laboratories, now a part of Wyeth Research. At Wyeth, he has served as leader of the glycylcycline discovery team that produced tigecycline for multidrug resistant bacterial infections.
Dr. Projan has served as a member of several NIH study sections and five editorial boards. He is currently a member of the ECCMID (European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases) program committee, was a past chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Staphylcoccal Diseases and chair of Division A (new antimicrobial agents) of the American Society for Microbiology. In 2006 Dr. Projan was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.