Biography 

Mark Cochran’s professional career has focused on innovation and advancing ideas through development into the marketplace. Mark’s experience spans the spectrum of the global health care value chain including drug discovery, vaccine discovery and development, business development, clinical research, disease management, Wellness and Lifestyle management, program management, and venture capital initiatives. He has held leadership positions in organizations such as Johns Hopkins Medicine, Bayer Pharmaceuticals (in Germany and USA), Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute, MDS Capital Corp., and NeuroVentures Capital.

Most recently Mark retired from Johns Hopkins Medicine, where he had built and led the Johns Hopkins HealthCare Solutions team, a unique initiative charged with expanding and managing partnerships with the business world, fostering collaborations among faculty and clinicians to leverage their intellectual assets and bringing to external markets evidence-based innovations that address the wide range of population health challenges.

An inventor of several recombinant vaccines and other biological products, and author of a number of scientific papers, Mark also co-founded MicroGeneSys Inc., a Connecticut-based vaccine company, renamed Protein Sciences, and acquired by Sanofi in 2018. It was this effort that pioneered the same technology being used today by NovoVax for their COVID-19 vaccine and Sanofi’s Flublok^R Quadrivalent Influenza Vaccine.

Mark sits on boards of two publicly traded companies: Microbix Biosystems, and as Chairman to iFabric. He is also actively engaged in advisory roles to Healthstat/ Everside, OBIO, and the Alzheimer’s Disease Drug Discovery Foundation. 

Mark holds a doctoral degree in Microbiology and Immunology from Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario; a master’s degree in Microbiology from the University of Guelph; and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto. He also was a Postdoctoral Fellow at NIAID of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD.

Mark now resides in central Virginia, USA, with his wife Joanne (U of G, CBS, Microbiology ’78).  Two of his three children live nearby and another in Northern California.  Mark and Joanne enjoy 8 grandchildren. 

Career Highlights / External Links

• Receiving the Guelph Alumni Medal of Achievement, 1988.
• Presenting baculovirus work to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, NY,  1982 when James Watson (of Watson and Crick DNA discovery fame) entered, late, listened then slept, though longer than he normally would, I am told!
• Photographed for the NYTimes together with Anthony Fauci during our AIDS Vaccine announcement in 1987.
• My zoom retirement celebration from Johns Hopkins in which my children participated.