Jake Reder, PhD.

Jake Reder, PhD

Director, New Ventures, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

Cofounder, Director, & Chief Executive Officer, Celdara Medical, LLC

PI, DRIVEN Accelerator Hub

 

In 2008, Jake Reder, PhD founded the New Ventures Office at The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth (formerly Dartmouth Medical School) and serves as its Director. The office provides Dartmouth’s innovators with first-hand counsel, gleaned from a career that spans venture investing, corporate/academic alliances, and entrepreneurship.

Jake co-founded Celdara Medical, LLC (CM) in 2008 with Dartmouth Professor Emeritus Dr. Michael Fanger as a way to bridge academic innovation and patient benefit. CM has subsequently employed a unique, highly capital-efficient business model to grow to encompass a large portfolio of funded programs and a robust innovation pipeline. Of note, CM brought a diagnostic service to market in 2010, a cellular therapy to the clinic in 2014, and spun-out and sold OnCyte, LLC in 2015 for >$500M in cash, stock, milestones and sponsored research, plus tiered royalties on sales. Celdara Medical was the #1 fastest growing company in the state in 2016, 2017, and 2018 (across all sectors, based on 3 y AAGR). In 2018, Jake launched the DRIVEN Accelerator Hub with support from the NIH. DRIVEN’s mission is to create quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) by increasing the number of quality medical start-ups, decreasing their time to market, increasing their probability of success. In two short years, DRIVEN’s clients have raised over $20M in follow-on funding. In 2020, Jake formed the Pandemic Security Initiative, which is designed to protect the nation from future pandemics by developing drugs that integrate the best of ground-breaking science, entrepreneurial innovation, public-sector investment and private-sector efficiency. This work was initiated in 2014 and formalized in early 2020 to capture learnings and aid in the response to COVID-19. Previously, Jake led new business platforms and projects, external innovation, and knowledge management initiatives at Cabot Corporation. He started Cabot’s Printed Electronics Business and Optical Composites Platform, and was a member of Cabot’s Research Council, Technology Board, and Nanotechnology EHS Council. Jake joined Cabot’s New Business Development team from PolyTechnos Venture-Partners, a Munich-based venture capital firm where he built deal flow, conducted due diligence, and advised on early stage technology investments.

Jake has studied, worked, and taught in Canada, Germany, and the United States. He has served on the Boards of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University, TechConnect, Everybody Wins! Metro Boston, the Cabot Boston Credit Union, and the Billerica Partners for Education. He is Chairman of Javelin Oncology, Inc. and CairnSurgical, Inc., was a co-founder and Director of Knowmata GmbH (sold to Abelware AS), a Director of Virtici LLC, MBV, LLC, and Stemsynergy Therapeutics, Inc., a Board Member of NIH’s TREAT Program, the New Hampshire High Technology Council Bio/Medical Forum, the University of Vermont’s SPARK Program, Harvard Medical School’s Medical Countermeasures Task Force, Dartmouth’s Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship Advisory Board, and the New Hampshire Academy of Science. In 2013, Jake  testified before Congress on issues of federal support for entrepreneurship, and was twice appointed by the Governor of New Hampshire to the New Hampshire Innovation Research Center’s Board of Directors, and by US Senator Jeanne Shaheen to her Small Business Advisory Council. In 2017, the US Small Business Administration named Jake the NH Small Business Person of the Year.

Jake earned a B.Sc. with First Class Honours from the University of Waterloo, and a Ph.D. (Chemistry) as a Brown-Wetherill Fellow at Purdue University and Ludwig Maximilians Universität, and has also studied at the Harvard Business and Law Schools, MIT’s Sloan School of Business, and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.