Prabha Fernandes

Dr. Prabhavathi Fernandes has more than 35 years of pharmaceutical discovery, development and management experience in large and small pharmaceutical companies. She obtained her undergraduate and Master’s degree training in India, worked at the University of Ghent, Belgium in Immunochemistry, received her Ph.D. in Microbiology from Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia and completed post-doctoral fellowship in Clinical and Public Health Microbiology.

Dr. Fernandes held executive leadership positions at pharmaceutical corporations including Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute where she was a vice-president in Drug Discovery, Abbott Laboratories, where she was the leader of Anti-infective Discovery and The Squibb Institute for Medical Research, where she conducted key research on the first monobactam antibiotic, aztreonam. She was directly involved in the development of antibiotics, six of which have been approved, with one, clarithromycin, achieving sales over a billion dollars for Abbott laboratories.

After leaving Bristol- Myers Squibb, she has founded and led four biotechnology and CRO companies as President, Chief Executive Officer and Director of each of these companies. Prior to her retirement in December 2016, she led Cempra, Inc. for 12 years as its founder, CEO and chief scientist and developed solithromycin and fusidic acid.

In 2012, she led the initial public offering and listing on Nasdaq for Cempra, and has successfully raised over half a billion dollars for the company and obtained additional drug development support by licensing solithromycin in Japan to Toyama/Fujifilm and obtained funding from BARDA, the biodefense arm of Health and Human Services in the U.S.

Prior to Cempra, she was President and CEO of DarPharma, Ricerca and Small Molecule Therapeutics. Dr. Fernandes has served on the U.S. Congressional Panel for Assessment of Impact of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria and on the American Society for Microbiology Advisory Panel for Antibiotic Resistance. She has worked on policy matters to help in combating antibiotic resistance with IDSA and the Anti-infective Working Group.

She serves as the Section Editor for the Journal of Antibiotics, is on the publications committee for the Infectious Diseases Society for America and is an ad hoc reviewer for other journals. She has served as a member of the Product Development working group for Biodefense for the NIAID; and was an Advisory Board Member of Optimer Pharmaceuticals, Inc. as well as the Supervisory Board of GPC Biotech.

At Optimer, she was involved with the development of fidaxomicin. In January 2017 she was appointed to the National Biodefense Science Board for the US Government and was appointed its Chairperson in July 2018. In 2018 she was appointed as a Scientific Advisor to GARDP (Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, a DNDi/WHO initiative) and has been appointed as its Chairperson from November 2019.

She is currently on the Supervisory Board of Curetis a European-based, publicly traded, molecular diagnostic company. She serves as a consultant and scientific advisor to a few other biotechnology companies.

She has authored over 250 publications and several reviews, book chapters and served as an editor for books.