David B. Smith

David B. Smith, Ph.D., serves as Executive Vice President and is our Head of Chemical Operations, he has been in this role since August 2018. Dr. Smith is a part of our Senior Leadership Team and a member of our Research, Development and Business Operations Teams. He is responsible for all Discovery Chemistry functions of the company at our South San Francisco and Belgium locations, heading up Medicinal Chemistry, Discovery Process Chemistry, Nucleos(t)ide Chemistry, Oligonucleotide Chemistry and related chemical outsourcing efforts. As Head of Intellectual Property, he is also responsible for the creation, coordination and management of the Aligos IP Portfolio. From May 2015 to August 2018, he served as Vice President at Janssen Pharmaceuticals and was the Global Disease Area Stronghold Leader for Hepatology in the Infectious Diseases Therapy Area. From February 2010 to April 2015, he held positions as Associate Director, Director and Senior Director of Product Development at Alios and Janssen. Dr. Smith started his industrial career at Syntex in 1991, where he held positions as Research Scientist and Research Scientist II. Following the acquisition of Syntex by Roche in 1995, he continued in this role, rising to Principal Research Scientist in 1998. During the period from 1993 to 2000, while at Syntex and Roche, he held a simultaneous annual position during winter quarter as a Consulting Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, teaching a Special Topics course in Organic Chemistry. Dr. Smith was an NIH post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University from 1989 through 1991. He earned his BS in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1984, graduating with highest honors. His graduate work was initiated at Yale University, where he earned the MS and MPhil degrees in 1988, and he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1989. Dr. Smith has been a Medicinal Chemist, Project Team Lead Chemist, Discovery Team Leader, Development Team Leader and Disease Area Leader and has worked in the area of Liver and Infectious Diseases for over 25 years, helping to advance multiple small molecule, nucleos(t)ide and oligonucleotide drug candidates into clinical trials. He is a co-inventor on over 80 issued US patents and a co-author on more than 50 peer reviewed scientific publications.