AstraZeneca and Amgen Pinpoint the New Modalities in Drug Delivery

Shawn Davis, PhD, is an Executive Director at AstraZeneca and leads the Drug Delivery team of the Biopharmaceuticals Development organization. The team improves patients’ lives by ensuring AZ’s therapies are as safe, effective, and convenient as possible using technologies that target the delivery of medicines to the site of action and optimizing their effective half-life. This requires the evaluation, development, and commercialization of drug delivery technologies across a wide range of modalities in the biopharmaceutical space. Areas of program delivery include: intracellular delivery of nucleic acids, controlled release of antibodies for less frequent dosing, novel routes of administration for therapeutic benefit, and co-delivery of multiple therapeutic molecules. Dr Davis also serves as the CMC leader for early stage assets in the portfolio for antibody, peptide, and RNA modalities.Over the past two decades, Dr Davis has been recognized as a thoughtful, decisive leader with a record of technical and organizational success delivering results for patients and shareholders. Throughout his career he has worked for companies ranging from early stage startups to the world’s largest Biopharmaceutical manufacturers. He has an ability to translate ambiguity and complexity into actionable next steps while balancing scientific, commercial, and clinical requirements. He has wealth of experience bridging the gap between current and future state of medicine while empowering high performance teams to deliver on the program’s vision and is a recognized expert in the field of drug delivery. 

Jerry obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Utah and was an NIH fellow at Harvard University before starting his industrial career at Pfizer Central Research. Prior to joining Amgen in 2006, Jerry was Sr. Director of Process Development at Merck Research Laboratories, where he led several PST level cross-functional teams. In August 2013, Jerry joined the Amgen Full Potential Initiative and led the AFP#3 team, Redesign Process Development through Business Case and into Implementation planning. In August 2014, Jerry became VP CMC Lifecycle Management within the Process Development organization where he managed the support for the commercial products and their lifecycle management activities, as well as the early development portfolio. His team was responsible for organizing and planning all drug delivery activities including drug substance manufacture, product formulation and drug delivery technologies including medical devices. During that timeframe, Amgen launched 10 new products for which this team was responsible for all CMC activities. In May 2018, Jerry was promoted to Sr. Vice President, Process Development, where he now serves both the Operations and R&D Organizations.