About Us

 Katherine Lee, PhD is a co-founder and CEO of Montani Bio. She earned her BS and PhD in Immunology from West Virginia University. Dr. Lee has expertise in preclinical modeling of disease, respiratory pathogens, preclinical cancer models, and mRNA vaccine development, with a focus on translational applications. She has approximately 15 peer-reviewed publications on her work and brings five years of experience in grant writing, laboratory protocol and pipeline development, and team and project management. Her work centers on advancing mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics through the development of scalable, efficient production pipelines and preclinical evaluation strategies. 

F. Heath Damron, PhD is a co-founder and CSO of Montani Bio. He earned his BS, MS, and PhD in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Marshall University, and currently serves as professor and founding director of the Vaccine Development Center (est. 2017). With more than 20 years of experience in funded grant writing, commercial partnerships, and preclinical vaccine research and development, Dr. Damron has secured over $20 million in research funding since 2014. His research program focuses on bacterial pathogenesis, molecular genetics, viral and bacterial respiratory infections, and cancer, with an emphasis on translational applications. He has authored approximately 76 peer-reviewed publications and is actively engaged in advancing innovative vaccine and therapeutic platforms.

Montani Biotechnologies incorporated in 2025 as a spinout of the Vaccine Development Center at West Virginia University Health Sciences Center. Driven by a passion to bring forward innovative solutions for human diseases, Drs. Damron and Lee founded the company as an opportunity for commercialization of their most exciting discoveries. Our goal moving forward is to continue to catalyze the potential of technologies from our academic space while building a research enterprise of our own.