Apriori Bio Appoints World-Class Vaccine, Immunology and Public Health Leaders to Board of Directors

Seth Berkley, M.D., Arup Chakraborty, Ph.D., and Ashish Jha, M.D., MPH, join the Board

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 24, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Apriori Bio, a biotechnology company aimed at providing humanity with variant-resilient protection against rapidly-evolving viruses, announced today the addition of three esteemed leaders to its Board of Directors. The new directors include Seth Berkley, M.D., former CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Arup Chakraborty, Ph.D., Scientific Advisor and Academic Partner at Flagship Pioneering, and Ashish Jha, M.D., MPH, former White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator. They join Board Chair Lovisa Afzelius, Ph.D., General Partner at Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and CEO of Apriori, and Travis Wilson, Growth Partner at Flagship Pioneering.

The Board will support Apriori's leadership team and the company as they advance Octavia™, Apriori's biology-informed artificial intelligence platform, for the development of vaccines to protect against current and potential viral threats.

"I am pleased to welcome Seth, Arup and Ashish to Apriori's Board of Directors," said Board Chair Lovisa Afzelius, Ph.D., General Partner at Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and CEO of Apriori. "When we launched Apriori, we set out to create a future where we can get ahead of viruses, instead of chasing them as they evolve. The unparalleled wisdom and experience of Seth, Arup and Ashish will be instrumental as we pioneer transformative solutions to better protect the global community against viral threats."

Apriori, a 2023 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, recently received a grant from CEPI to further advance Octavia to focus on viruses beyond coronaviruses. The research Apriori conducts on this front will feed into and be supported by CEPI's newly established Biosecurity function.

Seth Berkley, M.D.
Seth, a medical doctor and infectious disease epidemiologist, is an advisor to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health and several biotech, vaccine and technology companies. Previously, Seth was the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Under his leadership, Gavi accelerated global immunization access in its mission to save lives, reduce poverty and protect the world against the threat of epidemics and pandemics. He also co-founded and led COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX), which provided more than two billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to 146 countries, and founded the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. Seth has worked with the Special Pathogens Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Ministry of Health of Uganda and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2022, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and has been recognized by several publications for his contributions to global health, including Newsweek, TIME and WIRED.

Arup Chakraborty, Ph.D.
Arup is a scientific advisor and academic partner at Flagship Pioneering. He is one of a maximum of 12 Institute Professors at MIT, the highest rank awarded to a MIT faculty member. He is also a professor of chemical engineering, physics and chemistry. Arup was the founding director of MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and is a founding member of the Ragon Institute of MIT, MGH and Harvard. For over two decades, Arup's work has largely focused on bringing together approaches from immunology, physics and engineering. Arup is one of less than 30 individuals who are members of all three branches of the US National Academies – National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering.

Ashish Jha, M.D., MPH
Ashish is the former White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, appointed by President Joe Biden. While serving in this role, he led the work that increased the development of and access to treatments and newly formulated vaccines, dramatically improved testing and surveillance, facilitated major investments in indoor air quality measures and put in place an infrastructure to respond to current and future disease outbreaks more effectively. Before his appointment to the White House, Ashish served as the Dean of the Brown School of Public Health and a Professor of Health, Policy, and Practice. Prior to joining Brown University, Ashish was the Faculty Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute from 2014 until 2020 and served as the Dean for Global Strategy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from 2018 to 2020. He is also a practicing physician with deep expertise in infectious diseases. 

About Apriori Bio
Apriori is working to create a world that is protected against viral threats. Our pioneering approach centers on a unique technology platform, Octavia™, which allows us to survey the entire landscape of existing and potential variants to design new vaccines against the most threatening viruses. Octavia can also inform public health policy in real time by predicting the impact of emerging variants. Apriori was founded in 2020 in Flagship Labs, a unit of Flagship Pioneering. For more information visit www.aprioribio.com or follow us on LinkedIn and X at @AprioriBio.

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