Thomas Wechsler, Ph.D.

Thomas Wechsler, Ph.D.
Chief Scientific Officer

Thomas Wechsler, Chief Scientific Officer of Aurora Therapeutics, is an accomplished research leader with more than 15 years of experience in genomic medicines for rare diseases.

Prior to joining Aurora, Dr. Wechsler was Head of Gene Therapy at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine as part of the Therapeutics Discovery organization, where he led the discovery and optimization of gene therapy clinical candidates for a range of therapeutic areas including retinal diseases and neuroscience. Previously, he was Vice President of Research at Grace Science developing an AAV-based gene therapy for the rare disease NGLY1 deficiency.

Dr. Wechsler began his career in industry at Sangamo Therapeutics, where he contributed to the first ever in vivo gene editing program to gain FDA approval to start clinical trials using a nuclease-based mechanism and to the successful STAAR gene therapy trial for the treatment of Fabry disease. He holds a Ph.D. in biology from University of Munich, and completed his Ph.D. thesis work at University of California San Francisco. He conducted his postdoctoral fellowships working on DNA repair at Cancer Research UK and Stanford University.