Dr. Tom Novak is the Chief Scientific Officer of Autobahn Labs. Prior to joining Autobahn Labs, he was Vice President of Life Sciences Business Development at Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), the world’s leading supplier of stem cell-derived, terminally differentiated cells. In addition, he was the Principal Investigator on CDI’s $16MM grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to reprogram samples from 3000 patients with a variety of multigenic disorders. As part of CIRM’s “Human iPSC Initiative” he was also the PI on CDI’s $6.3MM subcontract with the Coriell Institute for Medical Research to provide stocks of iPSC clones for commercial sale. Prior to joining CDI in 2012, Dr. Novak was Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Fate Therapeutics, a San Diego-based biotech developing small molecules and biologics to induce proliferation and differentiation of adult stem cells to replace tissue lost to aging or disease. From 2001 to 2010, Dr. Novak held a number of positions at Roche Palo Alto, including Senior Director and Head of Discovery Technologies wherein he led a group of >60 scientists with responsibility for all compound screening, cell culture, molecular biology, protein production, and crystallography at that site. In 2009, he was chosen to lead a global team of scientists to evaluate opportunities to utilize stem cells as research tools. This ultimately led to the initiation of three collaborations (CDI, iSTEM, and Harvard Stem Cell Institute) centered around nonclinical safety, neuroscience, and cardiovascular diseases, respectively.
Dr. Novak earned an AB in biology and chemistry, magna cum laude, from Amherst College (Amherst, MA) and received his PhD in molecular biology and immunology from Caltech (Pasadena, CA). After completing post-doctoral training in immunobiology at Yale University, he began his pharmaceutical career in 1994 as a research scientist at Wyeth-Ayerst in Princeton, NJ.
