David I. Scheer

Since 1981, Mr. Scheer has been president of Scheer & Company, Inc., a company that has had a highly successful track record of building companies, along with providing corporate strategic and transactional advisory services in the life sciences industry. Much of his company-building activity emerged from a nearly 10-year affiliation with Oak Investment Partners, as part of their Health Care Investing Team.

Mr. Scheer was a co-founder of Achillion Pharmaceuticals, a New Haven–based, publicly held, biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of small molecule therapeutics for complement-related diseases, and for 21 years, he served on its board of directors. Achillion was acquired by Alexion in February 2020. From 2010 through the end of 2018, he served as the company’s chairman of the board. He is also chairman of the board of the privately held companies BiologicsMD, Inc., and DNAMx, Inc.

He was involved in the founding and has been on the boards of a series of privately and publicly held companies, including Viropharma (acquired by Shire/Takeda), OraPharma (acquired by JNJ, now a unit of Valeant) and the original Esperion Therapeutics (acquired by Pfizer), for which he served as chairman of the board. Mr. Scheer also served as a co-founder and chairman of the boards of directors of Aegerion (now a part of Amryt), Optherion, Axerion (now ReNetx), ArRETT Neuroscience and several others. Additionally, Mr. Scheer serves as a member of the board of directors of BioCT, and on the executive board of the Center for Biomedical Innovation and Technologies (CBIT) at Yale University. He has also been an adviser to the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD), and serves as chair of the NORD Strategic Advisory Council. Mr. Scheer has also been an adviser to the Rett Syndrome Research Trust. He serves as a founding member of the Director’s Impact Advisory Committee for the Rutgers Global Health Institute, and as a founding member of the Compassionate Use and Preapproval Access (CUPA Working Group) at the NYU Langone Medical School. He also served on a variety of initiatives and advisory committees for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, including the Harvard Malaria Initiative, Unfinished Agenda in Infectious Diseases and the Global Task Force for the Control of Cancer (GTF.CC), and he served as a global co-organizer of AIDS@30, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the diagnosis of the first AIDS patient.

He leads the CT BioScience Coronavirus Task Force, and has been a member of the Reopen CT Advisory Group. He is a member of the board of directors of the Global Virus Network, an organization founded by the co-discoverer of HIV, Dr. Robert Gallo, as a network of institutions and individuals with the goal of preparing for and responding to pandemic threats.

Mr. Scheer holds an A.B. degree cum laude in biochemical sciences from Harvard College and an M.S. degree in cell, molecular and developmental biology from Yale University.