Lisa M. Plitnick PhD

Lisa Plitnick joined the Department of Safety Assessment and Laboratory Animal Resources in Merck Research Laboratories in August of 2002. Lisa has worked as a Study Director and currently serves as the Preclinical Safety Lead on drug development teams and the Therapeutic Area Lead for Vaccines. Lisa is also the Scientific and Regulatory Advisor for the in Vivo Biologics Release Testing Group in the Merck Manufacturing Division and the Scientific Advisor for the Immunotoxicology laboratory. As a Preclinical Safety Lead, Lisa has been responsible for small molecule, biologics and vaccine programs in various therapeutic areas including infectious diseases, atherosclerosis, diabetes, asthma, osteoporosis, and obesity.

Lisa is co-editor of a book entitled Nonclinical Development of Novel Biologics, Biosimilars, Vaccines, and Specialty Biologics and has written and/or contributed to several book chapters on biologics and vaccines and peer-reviewed journal articles. Lisa is also a member of the HESI ILSI Immunotoxicology Technical Committee, the BioSafe Specialty Biologics Expert and MoA/MoT working groups and the Merck Immunotoxicology Council.

Lisa received a B.A in Biology from The State University of New York at Oswego. She received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Immunology from the Albany Medical College, in Albany, New York where she determined how the commensal oral bacterium, S. mutans, evades the immune system. Following her graduate work, she did a postdoctoral fellowship with a focus on Immunotoxicology in the Curriculum in Toxicology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill which was part of a CRADA with Dow Chemical and DuPont where she worked to develop an assay to distinguish between respiratory and contact sensitizers.