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Eckard Weber, MD

Director and Chief Innovation Officer

Eckard is an American neuroscientist, researcher, inventor, biotechnology entrepreneur and venture investor. Born and raised in Germany, he received his M.D. degree from the University of Ulm, Medical School in Germany in 1979. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford Medical School, he pursued an academic research career at Stanford University, the Oregon Health Sciences University and the University of California. His last academic position was as a professor of pharmacology at UC Irvine.

In 1995 Eckard left academia to pursue his interests in drug development as a biotechnology entrepreneur in collaboration with Domain Associates, one of the first biotechnology-focused venture capital firms in the US. In 2000, Eckard joined Domain as a partner where he specialized in creating companies around novel therapeutic approaches to diverse disease indication targets. At Domain, he founded more than a dozen biotech companies which he led as start-up CEO. The companies he founded developed several novel drugs that are now approved and marketed world-wide. These include Teflaro, a novel antibiotic to treat methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus infections, now marketed by Pfizer; Zerbaxa, a novel antibiotic drug to treat infections caused by gram-negative bacteria, now marketed by Merck; and Contrave, a novel CNS-acting anti-obesity medication that he invented and that is now marketed by Currax Pharmaceuticals.

In 2019 he left Domain to again become an independent entrepreneur. He founded Transposon Therapeutics in 2020 in order to pursue his long-standing interest to develop a novel approach to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease by utilizing reverse transcriptase inhibitors to block the replication of LINE-1 retrotransposable elements. LINE-1 elements are parasitic retrovirus-like DNA elements that are present in large DNA copy numbers in the human genome and that have recently been implicated in the development of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. After founding Transposon he raised approximately $65M to carry out Phase 2 clinical proof of concept trials with the company’s LINE-1 reverse transciptase inhibitor drug candidate, TPN-101. He currently serves as the company’s Chief Innovation Officer. In this role, he leads all of Transposon’s R&D activities.

He is inventor of numerous patents and patent applications and author of more than 100 articles in scientific periodicals.