People

Brian Maiorella is an industrial fellow on the board of the UC Berkeley Alternative Meat Lab, and advises companies in areas of biotechnology, biopharmaceutical development, and new foods innovation.  He is an adjunct professor in the University of California at Berkeley College of Chemistry, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in biochemical process design and pharmaceutical product development strategy.  Dr. Maiorella has 20 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, with expertise in drug development portfolio management and optimization of the drug product development process.  He retired in 2001 as vice president of process development at Chiron, where he had served on the corporate drug portfolio ranking team and on the management team overseeing all products in clinical development.  He led the division responsible for fermentation, purification, formulation, analytical, and drug delivery process development for recombinant therapeutic products; including oversight of pilot GMP manufacturing to support preliminary clinical testing, and technology transfer to commercial manufacturing operations.  Dr. Maiorella has applied his experience in bioprocess design to the analysis of challenges for cultivated meat production, and is inventor of a means for directed cellular self-assembly to achieve desired appearance and structure for a cultivated meat product. Dr. Maiorella is inventor of several patents in the areas of mammalian cell culture and biopharmaceutical manufacturing, holds degrees in chemical engineering and management from UC Berkeley and MIT, and is winner of the American Chemical Society William H. Peterson Award in biochemical engineering.