Jakob Cramer

Director of Clinical Development

CEPI

Dr Jakob Peter Cramer is a medical doctor specialised in internal medicine, tropical medicine, travel medicine and infectious diseases with extensive experience in vaccine development in a routine and emergency context. He joined the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) as Director of Clinical Development in June 2019. In this role, Jakob is active in developing concepts for accelerated vaccine development in response to epidemics and pandemics within the vaccine ecosystem in support of CEPI's '100 Days Mission'. At the same time, Jakob's team in CEPI overseas the clinical development of CEPI-funded priority pathogen vaccine development programmes (incl. Lassa fever-, Marburg disease-, Rift-Valley fever-, Mpox-, MERS-, Corona-viruses) as well as CEPI-supported vaccine platform technologies (incl. mRNA, viral vector) and explores accelerated / alternative pathways towards licensure. The clinical team covers the following areas: Clinical operations, vaccine safety and pharmacovigilance, translational immunology and clinical serology, clinical science.

Prior to his role at CEPI, Jakob was Head of the Tropical Medicine Section at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf as well as the Clinical Research Unit at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM) in Hamburg, Germany, where he founded the clinical trials unit and conducted Phase 1/2/3 vaccine trials against various infectious diseases (including influenza, rabies, Japanese encephalitis, meningococcal diseases, travellers' diarrhoea) as principle investigator. During his 14 years in academia, he engaged in multiple epidemiological and investigator-initiated clinical research in Africa. From 2014 to 2019, Jakob held the position of Medical Director, Clinical Development, Vaccine Business Unit, Takeda Pharmaceuticals International AG, Zurich, Switzerland where he was actively involved in Takeda's norovirus and dengue as well as the BMGF-funded polio (within the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, GPEI) vaccine development programmes. He is an invited lecturer at various courses in the fields of vaccinology, pandemic / outbreak preparedness and infectious diseases at different universities and institutions. He is also a member of a number of infectious diseases societies.