PATH names Dr. David C. Kaslow as vice president of product development

July 12, 2013 by PATH

Ashley Birkett appointed deputy director of PATH's Malaria Vaccine Initiative

Contact:
Amy MacIver, 206.302.4522, amaciver@path.org.

Seattle, July 12, 2013—International global health organization PATH announced today the appointment of David C. Kaslow, MD, to the newly created position of vice president of product development, effective October 1, 2013. In this new role, Kaslow will oversee the activities of all five of PATH’s product development programs, as well as PATH’s China programs, which also focus heavily on product development activities. Kaslow is currently director of PATH’s Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI).

“We are excited to expand David’s role at PATH and leverage his considerable management skills, scientific expertise, and product development experience to oversee our product development portfolio and some key product delivery mechanisms. This position represents PATH’s continued commitment to innovation and its power to improve lives,” said Steve Davis, president and CEO of PATH. “His appointment comes after a global external search that resulted in the decision to promote from within—something we are very proud to be able to do.”

PATH’s five product development programs consist of MVI, Drug Development, Technology Solutions, Vaccine Development, and Vaccine Access and Delivery. These programs represent PATH’s work in community-based interventions, devices, diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines.

Davis will continue to oversee PATH’s product development programs until October 1. Following his shift to vice president in October, Kaslow will continue as director of MVI until the appointment of a successor.

Kaslow is a physician-scientist with 25 years of vaccine research and development experience whose professional career encompasses the academic, governmental, and private sectors. He served as vice president and head of vaccine project leadership and management at Merck Research Laboratories and worked for more than a decade as a tenured scientist at the National Institutes of Health, where he founded the Malaria Vaccine Development Unit. He became director of MVI in early 2012 and, prior to that, served for three years as chair of MVI’s Vaccine Science Portfolio Advisory Council.

“I am honored that PATH has asked me to work with all of its product development programs to contribute to the crucial work of bringing innovations to scale, and in a position that will keep me deeply engaged with MVI,” Kaslow said.

In his role as vice president for product development, Kaslow will continue to be closely involved with MVI’s efforts to complete development of RTS,S, the world’s most clinically advanced malaria vaccine candidate. RTS,S is currently in Phase 3 field trials, typically one of the final steps before submission to regulatory authorities. The trials are the outcome of a decade-long collaboration between PATH and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) that now involves 11 research centers in seven sub-Saharan African countries.

“I look forward to staying actively involved with RTS,S, given its stage of development,” Kaslow said. “This is an exciting time for the RTS,S program, as we await the final results from the Phase 3 safety and efficacy trial in late 2014.”

PATH also announced today that Ashley Birkett, PhD, a five-year veteran of MVI, and current director of research and development (R&D), has been appointed to the new position of deputy director at MVI, effective immediately.

“Ashley is widely respected for his knowledge of malaria vaccine development and has been involved in every major R&D initiative at MVI since joining the program in 2008,” said Kaslow. “In his new role, Ashley will help ensure continuity in leadership for the MVI program.”

Birkett has been with MVI since 2008. He was recognized earlier this year as one of the world’s 50 most influential people in the vaccine field due to his expertise in malaria vaccine development. In his position as director of R&D at MVI, Ashley has led MVI’s efforts to support the development of transmission-blocking vaccines; guided MVI’s portfolio of evaluation technology projects, which are developing and refining ways to assess vaccine efficacy prior to large-scale field trials; and provided technical support to MVI’s two additional program areas: next-generation vaccines and the RTS,S program.

Birkett has more than 15 years of vaccine development experience, primarily with biotechnology companies, where he successfully advanced novel influenza and malaria vaccine candidates from research through first-in-human clinical studies. Prior to joining MVI, he was senior director of preclinical research at Acambis (now Sanofi Pasteur Biologics Co.).