Bennett M. Shapiro

Biography

Dr. Shapiro, has served on our board of directors since September 2004 and has served as Chairman since 2007. In addition to serving on our board of directors, Dr. Shapiro has served as a senior partner at Puretech Ventures, an innovation enterprise, since 2004, and as chairman from 2009-2015; he now continues as a Non-Executive Director of PureTech HealthPLC-PRTC. Prior to this, he was Executive Vice President, Merck Research Laboratories (NASDAQ: MRK). He joined Merck in 1990 as Executive Vice President, Worldwide Basic Research, where he was responsible for all the basic and preclinical research activities at Merck; in 1999 he became Executive Vice President, Worldwide Licensing and External Research, where he directed all of Merck’s research relationships with the academic and industrial biomedical research community, and retired from Merck in 2003. Previously, he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. He is the author of more than 120 papers on the molecular regulation of cellular behavior and the biochemical events that integrate the cascade of cellular activations at fertilization.  Dr. Shapiro received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Dickinson College and his doctorate degree in medicine from Jefferson Medical College. Following an Internship in Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, he was a Research Associate at the NIH, then a Visiting Scientist at the Institute Pasteur in Paris and returned to the NIH as Chief – Section on Cellular Differentiation in the Laboratory of Biochemistry, prior to joining the University of Washington. Dr. Shapiro has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and a Visiting Professor at the University of Nice. He has served on many institutional advisory boards and scientific review panels. Dr. Shapiro also currently serves as an external director on the board of directors of various private companies and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an independent, non-profit development partnership. Dr. Shapiro previously served on the board of directors of Momenta Pharmaceuticals, and on the board of directors of Celera Corporation prior to its acquisition by Quest Diagnostics Inc.

Research Interest

Healthcare