George Trager

George is Senior Director of CMC at Meissa Vaccines. With more than 35 years of experience in the industry, he has directed the development of numerous biologicals, small molecule drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines. Prior to joining Meissa, George worked for Vaxart and MedImmune/AstraZeneca developing oral and intranasal vaccines. He led efforts to develop, characterize, and gain BLA approval for MedImmune’s refrigerator stable FluMist vaccine and developed Vaxart’s room temperature stable oral vaccine platform technology, which is currently in clinical trials supporting several disease indications. He has extensive experience in upstream and downstream biopharmaceutical manufacturing process development and characterization and has developed processes for early preclinical through late-stage clinical development and commercial implementation. George has had key roles in several BARDA-funded projects for pandemic response, directing CMC-related activities. Earlier in his career, he held roles of increasing responsibility at Matrix, Genelabs, and Xoma developing oncology drugs, viral diagnostics, antiviral biologicals, and subunit vaccine antigens, as well as monoclonal antibodies and ADCs. George earned his B.S. in biochemistry from San Francisco State University and MBA from Pepperdine University.