Tamas Oravecz, Ph.D., is Senior Director and Head of Exploratory Biology within Janssen BioTherapeutics (JBIO), Janssen Research & Development. He is based at Spring House, PA. His team is responsible for scientifically maturing project proposals in the large molecule space and collaborating with the Janssen Therapeutic Areas (TAs) to support their concept building research, with the end goal to develop the best antibody and cell therapeutic candidates across TAs. Tamas’ organization also provides state-of-the-art immunohistochemistry support for toxicology profiling of programs.
Tamas’s scientific interests and experience cover autoimmunity, inflammation, tumor immunology and cancer. His work has focused on the identification and validation of targets in these therapeutic areas and the development of antibodies, protein and gene therapy approaches, and small molecule compounds against the validated targets.
Tamas previously was Executive Director of Biology and Pharmacology at Celgene, where he built an internal and external early drug pipeline of antibody and small molecule targets and oversaw the lifecycle of therapeutics in clinical phase. He also served in positions from Director to Vice President at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, initiating and managing numerous discovery projects that resulted in lead candidates and approved therapeutic modalities. He was also Program Head of HIV Cell and Gene Therapy at Novartis and Senior Scientist at the National Institutes of Health.
In his academic career, Tamas has been in the forefront of characterizing monoclonal antibodies analyzed by the International Workshops on Leukocyte Differentiation Antigens and has participated in the establishment of the Cluster of Differentiation (CD) nomenclature. He investigated the structure and function of leukocyte surface receptors and chemokines, and the signaling mechanisms responsible for immunological dysfunction after HIV-1 infection. He also contributed to grant reviews on the Innate Immunity and Inflammation Study Sections at the NIH and served as a scientific reviewer of Investigational New Drug Applications at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
To date, Tamas has co-authored 46 peer-reviewed publications, contributed to book chapters and is an inventor of numerous patents and patent applications. He graduated from the University of Szeged in Hungary, where he obtained his PhD degree in Immunology and Molecular Biology.