Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro, M.D., is a co-founder of PureTech and a member of the R&D Committee. As executive vice president at Merck Research Laboratories of Merck & Co., Dr. Shapiro initially led Worldwide Basic Research and was responsible for all the basic and preclinical research activities at Merck. He later led Worldwide Licensing and External Research and was responsible for Merck’s relationships with the academic and industrial biomedical research community. His leadership resulted in the discovery, development, and registration of approximately 25 drugs and vaccines.

Previously, he was professor and chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington and is the author of over 120 papers on the molecular regulation of cellular behavior. 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 Institut 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 currently serves as a member of the board of directors of VBL Therapeutics. Dr. Shapiro previously served as a director of Celera Corporation. He also is a director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative and the Mind and Life Institute. Dr. Shapiro received a B.S. in Chemistry from Dickinson College and his M.D. from Jefferson Medical College.