Dennis Lee, PhD Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Dennis Lee is a Senior Program Officer in CMC at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he provides product development support for vaccines and drugs, with a focus on long-acting and other advanced drug delivery technologies.

He began his career as a medicinal chemist with the SmithKline Beecham (a GSK legacy company). In 1999, Dennis relocated to the San Francisco Bay area as Director of Chemistry at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, a start-up that developed molecular fragment-based approaches for drug discovery. He returned to GSK in 2001, and headed medicinal chemistry in cardiovascular and urogenital diseases.

Over the next several years, his group progressed several compounds into clinical development. In 2008, Dennis became Head of Chemistry and Preclinical Development in the new Ophthalmology unit at GSK. He contributed to the formation and evolution of the Ophthalmology business strategy, co-managed the discovery portfolio, and implemented and executed the drug delivery strategy for retinal diseases. He then joined GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia, in which he and a group of senior drug discovery scientists identified and executed drug discovery collaborations with individual academic groups.

In 2014, he became Director of Drug Delivery, Platform Technology and Sciences, a newly-formed drug delivery group, whose mission was to seek and develop novel drug delivery technologies that align with GSK’s portfolio. He relocated to Seattle to join the Gates Foundation in Jul 2018.