Ariel Weinberger, PhD

Dr. Ariel Weinberger is the CEO & Founder of Autonomous. Ariel has led Autonomous since its founding in 2017, and has grown Autonomous to more than 20 people in its own 20,000 square foot R&D facility in Rockville, MD.

Under Ariel’s leadership, Autonomous has raised tens of millions of dollars in non-dilutive and venture capital funding—and has pioneered new classes of nucleic acids to enable precision and target-activated medicines from pandemic influenza to metastatic cancers.

Autonomous’ funders have included the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Third Kind Venture Capital (3kVC), and BLUE KNIGHT™, a joint initiative between the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JLABS.

Ariel completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an NDSEG fellow and received the California HIV/AIDS Dissertation Prize. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard as an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Fellow.

Prior to founding Autonomous, Ariel was a Principal Investigator and Wyss Institute Fellow at Harvard Medical School.

Timothy Notton, PhD

Dr. Timothy Notton is Chief Scientific Officer at Autonomous and co-inventor of Autonomous’ Encrypted RNA™ platform and variant-proof therapeutic candidates from RSV to cancers.

Tim earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from both the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley—where he developed an earlier high-throughput platform technology to screen and identify first-in-class antivirals to combat HIV and Zika.

At Autonomous, Tim leads the scientific team that has developed multiple RNA platform technologies and a suite of first-in-class therapeutic candidates—in addition to automated antiviral screening and LNP delivery platforms. For his work, Tim was recently one of 50 early career scientists to be named a DARPA Riser at DARPA’s 60th Anniversary Conference.

Leor Weinberger, PhD

Dr. Leor Weinberger is the President of R&D at Autonomous and co-founded the company in 2017. He was the William and Ute Bowes Distinguished Professor at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Leor pioneered the approach of Therapeutic Interfering Particles (TIPs)—a first-in-class antiviral technology that is single-dose and escape-resistant (ted.com/talks/leor_weinberger).

Leor’s TIP inventions and multi-year collaboration with Ariel led DARPA to develop the INTERCEPT program, a $50M global initiative that funded virology programs worldwide.

In 2020, Leor’s lab discovered TIPs for SARS-CoV-2 (Chaturvedi et al. Cell 2021) and provided long-sought evidence for the therapeutic effect of the TIP mechanism of action. Most recently, in 2024, Leor and his lab demonstrated the safety and protective efficacy of TIPs in nonhuman primates, by reducing viral loads 10,000-fold for months after a single TIP dose (Pitchai et al. Science 2024).

Leor also discovered HIV’s stochastic latency circuit (Weinberger et al. Cell 2005), which provided the first experimental evidence that stochastic fluctuations (‘noise’) in mammalian gene expression drive biological fate decisions. The studies of Leor’s lab overturned dogma in the field by showing that HIV latency was a ‘hardwired’ virus program (Razooky et al. Cell 2015 and Rouzine et al. Cell 2015). His lab also discovered stochastic latency programs in other viruses (Chaturvedi et al. PNAS 2020).

Finally, Leor’s lab discovered noise-enhancer molecules (Dar et al. Science 2014)—and discovered a cellular noise-control pathway that potentiates embryonic cell-fate transitions (Desai et al. Science 2021). These studies demonstrated that transcriptional noise can be a ‘feature rather than a bug,’ playing a functional, physiological role in cellular systems.

Over the last 20 years, Leor has been the lead author in publications in Science, Cell, Nature Genetics, PNAS and other major scientific journals. His work has also been highlighted in the popular press, including in: Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Sunday Times, and in a TED talk. His antiviral work was recently featured in Science (science.org/bold-new-strategy-suppress-hiv) and by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times (nytimes.com/2024/engineered-virus-steals-proteins-from-hiv).

Leor is the only individual to have been awarded the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the NIH/NIDA Avant Garde Award, and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.