Our team

Professor Amit Nathwani is the founder of NovalGen and serves as the Company’s CEO and is a member of the Board of Directors. Professor Nathwani is a renowned serial innovator and entrepreneur. He has an international reputation for his work in cancer research, immunology, and gene therapy and has been the recipient of a number of awards, including Outstanding Achievement Award in 2016 from ESGCT and American Society of Hematology and the Ham-Wasserman Lecture award in 2019. He is well known for his dedication to translational medicine and his commonly cited pioneering work in gene therapy where he was the first to show successful correction of bleeding diathesis in patients with severe hemophilia B.

He is the Founder and was the CSO (until end 2020) and now serves as a Board member of Freeline. Over the last 20 years Professor Nathwani has coordinated numerous Phase II and III trials in the treatment of refractory chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and is an author of more than 200 publications. He is the Principal Investigator on several early phase studies and an author of several patents. He continues to serve as the Director of the Katharine Dormandy Hemophilia Centre at the Royal Free Hospital and as a Senior NIHR Investigator. Additionally, he has also been a Professor of Hematology at University College London since November 2011. Professor Nathwani graduated with MBChB from the University of Aberdeen in 1984 and is a fellow of the Royal College of Physician as well as the Royal College of Pathologist since June 1995. He holds a PhD in Molecular Biology.

Dr Kieran O’Donovan has more than 25 years’ experience in the Biotech/Biopharma industry, starting his career heading up Research and Development in the then nascent probiotic industry before moving into the CMC arena at Protherics. At Protherics, he led process development working on Fab fragments and recombinant proteins. In 2007, he moved to Ipsen as Head of Industrialisation, becoming Vice President of Toxins and Biologics in 2011 developing natural and recombinant toxins as well as recombinant proteins for the treatment of Hemophilia. 

Dr O’Donovan later took up the role of Head of CMC at ReNeuron in 2015 and was promoted to Director of CMC in 2017 leading the development, manufacture and clinical supply of their allogenic stem cell therapies. He holds a PhD in computer modelling of a bioreactor process from the University of Surrey and is a microbiologist by training.

Dr David Granger has over 15 years’ experience in drug discovery, working on both small molecule and antibody therapeutic programmes. Originally trained as a pharmacologist, he joined global pharmaceutical company GSK following a PhD and post-doctoral research position at Imperial College. At GSK David led bispecific antibody programmes utilising different discovery platforms, whilst overseeing multiple collaborations. In 2017, he joined bispecific antibody biotechnology company Crescendo Biologics as a Senior Scientist, leading therapeutic immuno-oncology programmes, and developing and embedding a bispecific discovery platform into the workflow. David was appointed Director of R&D at newly incorporated NovalGen in 2019, before being promoted to Vice President of R&D in 2021. He leads the R&D team with activities spanning from target identification and antibody discovery through to translational research and IND enabling studies.