Michael Watson | Vice President of Global Immunization Policy
Sanofi Pasteur

Michael Leads the Sanofi Pasteur Vaccination Policy team that is responsible for the interface between Sanofi Pasteur and Global and Regional Governmental and Non-Governmental Public Health organisations involved in immunisation Policy, Funding, Financing and, Implementation, Advocacy and issue resolution. He recently completed his term as chair of the Vaccines Committee of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, (IFPMA), he leads the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Group of the IFPMA, is on the Board of Vaccines Europe and leads their R&D Working Group, is a Steering Committee of the New York Academy of Sciences Vaccines Group and is Chair of the Sanofi Pasteur HIV steering committee.

He is a UK trained physician who led the teams that developed and licensed Pediacel^® in the UK and Gardasil^® in Europe. He has worked on most classes of vaccines, including Hexavalent infant vaccines. 

He was previously Head of R&D and US site head at the UK Biotech company, Acambis PLC, based in Boston, US, until it was acquired by sanofi pasteur. At Acambis he oversaw the licensure of the smallpox vaccine ACAM2000®, the R&D of Chimerivax® based vaccines against Japanese encephalitis, and West Nile Fever, an M2e universal Influenza vaccine, ACAM-FLU-A™, and the worlds most advanced C. difficile vaccine, as well as a number of pre-clinical stage projects including an HSV-2 vaccine and a number of innovative new vaccine delivery platforms. 

He is currently chairing the Vaccine’s Europe (VE) R&D working group which is working with EATRIS, Sclavo Vaccines Association (SVA) and European Vaccine Institute (EVI) to lead the FP7 funded IPROVE project intended to develop a vaccines R&D roadmap for Europe.