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 25 biomedical scientists, engineers, and professionals in its 20,000 square foot R&D facility in Rockville, MD.

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

Autonomous’ funders include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Third Kind Venture Capital (3kVC), the Capability Program Executive for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (CPE-CBRND), the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and BLUE KNIGHT™, a joint initiative between the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JLABS.

Ariel’s initial training was in mathematics. He obtained his PhD in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an NDSEG fellow and received the California HIV/AIDS Dissertation Prize. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship as an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Fellow at Harvard.

Prior to founding Autonomous, Ariel was a Principal Investigator (PI) and Wyss Institute Technology Development Fellow at Harvard Medical School.

Timothy Notton, PhD

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

Tim earned his PhD 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 directs a scientific team that has developed multiple nucleic acid platform technologies and a suite of first-in-class therapeutic candidates—in addition to automated antiviral screening and 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 President of R&D at Autonomous and co-founder of the company. He is the Sylvester Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cell and Systems Biology at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami. He was previously the William and Ute Bowes Distinguished Professor at 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.