Daniel R. Henderson

Dr. Daniel Henderson is a co-founder and chief executive officer of Verndari, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in Napa, California, that aims to transform global health through vaccine science.

Prior to Verndari, Dr. Henderson co-founded and served as president of PaxVax, a company based in Redwood City, California, focused on developing, manufacturing, and commercializing specialty vaccines to protect against existing and emerging infectious diseases, such as typhoid, cholera, and hepatitis A for travelers to countries without adequate water sanitation and anthrax for the U.S. military. While at PaxVax, Dr. Henderson was the named principal investigator on a virus-vectored oral bird flu vaccine (H5) with funding of $10 million for a phase one clinical trial (Wellcome Trust HN-#704483, 2008). PaxVax was later sold to Emergent BioSolutions in 2018. In 2016, PaxVax was named Best Early-Stage Vaccine Biotech company at the 16th annual World Vaccine Congress in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Henderson was the founder, president and CEO of Calydon, a private U.S. biotechnology company located in Sunnyvale, California, which focused on developing therapeutics for cancer. At Calydon, which was sold to Cell Genesys in 2004, he patented a method for genetically engineering an adenovirus targeting prostate cancer. Dr. Henderson has been recognized as one of two pioneers in the field of oncolytic virotherapy (Nettelbeck, D., October 2003 and July 2008, Tumor Busting Viruses, Scientific American).

Dr. Henderson was also the founder, president, and CEO of Microgenics Corporation, now a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific, which develops, manufactures, and markets immunodiagnostic tests. At Microgenics, Dr. Henderson invented the groundbreaking CEDIA ™ immunoassay system, a bioanalytical method that uses the specificity of an antigen-antibody reaction to detect molecules in biological samples. In 2015, Dr. Henderson was awarded the biennial Ullman Prize for Technology Innovation by the American Association for Clinical Chemistry for this groundbreaking work in developing the CEDIA ™ system. More than $1 billion of CEDIA ™ tests are now sold annually, the majority by Roche, as well as Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Dr. Henderson received a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Medical Sciences from University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He was a NIH postdoctoral fellow in molecular virology at Duke University Medical Center and also served as a visiting scholar in oncology cancer biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Henderson currently holds 34 U.S. patents in medical technology.