Saranya Sridhar MD, MS, PhD

Saranya Sridhar is the Head of Translational Medicine at Sanofi Vaccines and Global Head for COVID-19 and mRNA Vaccines Clinical Franchise. He is the Head of the Translational Science Hub in Queensland, a public-private partnership between the Queensland Government, the University of Queensland, Griffith University, and Sanofi. His team undertakes translational clinical research such as natural infection studies, experimental medicine studies, and first-in-human and biomarker studies using real-world data to address scientific unknowns in vaccine development. His current focus is to optimize the mRNA vaccine technology, understand the mechanism of action of mRNA vaccines, and undertake early development of new vaccines like Chlamydia. At Sanofi, he has led the clinical development and approval of Sanofi’s COVID-19 vaccine, worked on late-stage development and approval of the first dengue vaccine, and on early development for next-generation respiratory vaccines.

Saranya earned his medical degree in India and then was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a D.Phil at the University of Oxford where he worked on developing adenoviral vectored vaccines for malaria and tuberculosis. He completed a Masters in Epidemiology as a Fogarty International HIV Training Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined Sanofi after post-doctoral fellowships at Imperial College London and the Jenner Institute, Oxford where he worked on T-cell correlates of protection and T-cell-focused vaccines against influenza and tuberculosis. His expertise is in translational research and clinical development with a particular interest in respiratory pathogens.