John Shiver, Ph.D.

Dr. John Shiver is a Special Advisor for F-Prime Capital and is also Chief Strategy Officer at IGM ID a wholly owned subsidiary of IGM Biosciences. Established in 2021, IGM ID utilizes a proprietary IgM platform to treat and prevent infectious diseases. The potential utility of this platform for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases is supported by its recent application towards COVID-19 (Ku et al., Nature, published online 03 June 2021).

Prior to joining IGM ID, John was the SVP and Global Head of Vaccines R&D and a member of the Executive Leadership team for 8 years at Sanofi Pasteur, the largest company in the world devoted entirely to vaccines. He previously spent 22 years at Merck & CO where he held a series of senior leadership positions with his last position being VP and Head of Vaccines and Biologics Research. He was a member of Merck Vaccines Integrated Leadership Team and the Global Research Leadership Committee responsible for vaccine research, vaccine clinical assays and biomarkers, and biologics research, and siRNA technologies. Earlier in his career John spent five years at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.

John is a recognized expert and industry leader in vaccine and pharmaceutical research and development. He has guided numerous scientific teams that created novel vaccine and monoclonal antibody candidates to prevent or treat more than 40 infectious and non-infectious diseases, including HIV, influenza, HPV, RSV, CMV, pneumococcus, cancer, and asthma. He has collaborated with other senior leaders to secure the licensure of 14 pharmaceutical products spanning both vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, many of which were first- and/or best-in-class products addressing global infectious diseases. He also championed four acquisitions and three major collaborations to obtain new technologies or clinical candidates/products.

John is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the International Society of Vaccines (ISV) and a member of multiple advisory boards, including the Board of Directors for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), Board of Directors for Icosavax, and previously, the Executive Board of the International Society for Vaccines. He has also served on journal editorial boards, including Nature Partner Journals Vaccines and the Journal of Virology. He is the author of more than 150 articles, including 19 in Science, Nature, Cell, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is a co-author of 68 awarded patents. In addition, he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania College of Medicine and has been recognized by the Financial Times.

John holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biophysics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. He also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and Mathematics from Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.