Dominick A. Vacante PhD

Dominick A. Vacante, Ph.D. has been with Janssen Research & Development since 2009 and is a subject matter expert in virology, TSEs, and mycoplasma providing support for pharmaceutical development and marketed products. He has responsibility for CMC strategy, viral clearance, cell banking, and testing, and the development of monoclonal antibody and microbial products. Prior to that, he was at Ceregene, Inc. developing gene therapy products for neurological diseases leading process development, the contract manufacture of viral vectors, DNA plasmids, and delivery devices; in-house quality control, assay, and vector development. Prior to that, he was at BioReliance developing new assay technologies, starting up a viral contract manufacturing facility, and process development. Earlier in his career at BioReliance, he was study director for virus detection assays, virus clearance studies, and virus production.

Prior to that, he was at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke in the Infectious Diseases Branch researching the molecular neurovirology of human polyomaviruses (JCV, BKV) and HIV. He earned his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of Illinois in Chicago and his B.A. degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Northwestern University. Dominick Vacante also is a co-leader of the Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) Interest Group on Advanced Virus Detection Technologies (AVDTIG), which was formed to advance the tools for viral risk evaluation and testing using high throughput sequencing.