Diana Brainard, M.D.

Dr. Diana Brainard is an Entrepreneur Partner at MPM BioImpact. She is currently the CEO of AlloVir (NASDAQ: ALVR), a cell therapy company focused on developing innovative, allogeneic, off-the-shelf, virus-specific T cell (VST) therapies designed to treat life-threatening viral diseases. Diana has more than 25 years of research and industry experience and has been at the forefront of the most important antiviral therapies developed over the last two decades.

Previously Diana spent more than a decade at Gilead, where she played an enterprise-wide leadership role as the head of the virology therapeutic area overseeing the development and launch of some of the most successful drugs of the last decade including Sovaldi, Harvoni, Epclusa, Vosevi, Biktarvy, Descovy, and Vemlidy. In 2020, she led the company-wide initiative to rapidly advance remdesivir to become the first antiviral to receive regulatory approval for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2, which earned her global recognition as one of the most influential people in the fight against SARS-CoV-2. Her industry career began at Merck where she held positions in clinical pharmacology and experimental medicine.

Diana earned her M.D. from Tulane University School of Medicine and completed her training in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and in Infectious Diseases at MGH and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. She also completed a post-doctoral research fellowship and was on the faculty at Harvard Medical School where her NIH-funded research focused on HIV immunology and T-cell trafficking. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University.