Healthcare >> CEO Interviews >> October 12, 2001
DR. DONALD P. FRANCIS is President and co-Founder of VaxGen, Inc. From
1985 to 1992, Dr. Francis served as the Centers for Disease Control's
AIDS Advisor to the State of California. From 1988 to 1992, he also
served as Special Consultant on AIDS to then-San Francisco Mayor Art
Agnos, and chair of the mayor's HIV Task Force. He retired from the CDC
in 1992 and began work with Genentech, Inc., of South San Francisco, in
1993. Genentech had made significant breakthroughs in research towards a
vaccine against AIDS, including development of a vaccine shown to
protect chimpanzees against HIV infection. In 1995, Dr. Francis and
fellow retrovirologist Dr. Robert Nowinski guided the spin-off of
Genentech's HIV vaccine unit and founded VaxGen to continue the vital
work as an independent company. A third-generation California physician,
Dr. Francis did his undergraduate studies at the University of
California at Berkeley. He received his MD from Northwestern University
and his Doctor of Science in Virology from Harvard. He did his
internship and residency in pediatrics at the University of Southern
California Medical Center in Los Angeles and his fellowship in
infectious diseases at Harvard. Profile
Dr. Francis: We were a spin-off in 1995 of Genentech. Today we're an
independent company of about 80 employees running the world's
