Dr John Rothman was a clinical scientist at the pharmaceutical companies, Schering Plough and Roche, where he was also a clinical director for a number of different therapeutic areas and senior director for all of Roche’s data acquisition, statistical analysis and report writing for all experimental and approved drugs in the Roche portfolio. His work on interferon-α in AIDS-related Kaposi’s Sarcoma (a type of cancer) resulted in the approval of first recombinant drug and AIDS treatment in the 1980s called Roferon-A. Subsequently, as an R&D director at Roche, Dr Rothman was associated with a number of development programs that resulted in marketed drugs including Rocephin, Coactin, Midazolam, Rimadyl, Larotid, Dalmane, Rimantidine, Versed and others, as well as providing post-marketing support for numerous drugs. From 2005 to 2013, he was executive vice president of science & operations at the biotech company, Advaxis, where he was responsible for R&D, toxicology, regulatory, chemistry, data management, manufacturing and intellectual property. In 2012, Advaxis’ live cancer vaccine (ADXS11-001) was voted the world’s best cancer vaccine approved or in development by the vaccine industry and the journal Expert Reviews in Vaccines. Dr Rothman filed numerous patents and managed a portfolio of over 80 issued patents and patent applications; he managed manufacturing programs and developed new manufacturing methodologies, structured and oversaw preclinical laboratory programs, obtained FDA IND and overseas approvals, conducted clinical trials, managed regulatory relationships, academic research collaborations and Key Opinion Leader (KOL) relationships. Dr. Rothman studied for his PhD at Tulane University School of Medicine in the laboratory of Dr Louis Ignarro (Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1998) and then conducted his graduate research at the New Orleans VA Hospital in the laboratory of Dr Andrew Schally (Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1977). Dr Rothman was listed as one of the 20 notable people in R&D by R&D Directions magazine.
