Board Member
David Litwack, PhD
Bio
David Litwack, PhD, is currently Associate Vice President for Scientific Strategy and Communications at Prevail Therapeutics (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly), a biotech company that focuses on developing gene therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. In this role, he focuses on the development of new and innovative technologies.
Dr. Litwack spent many years as an academic scientist, and from 2002 to 2010 was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology and a member of the Program in Neuroscience at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. During that time, Dr. Litwack established and directed an NIH-funded lab that studied the role of transcription factors in neurogenesis in the mammalian brain and in human embryonic stem cells. He was also a founding member of the School’s Center for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, where he supported University leadership in establishing some of its initial programs and communications. Finally, he taught extensively in both graduate and medical school classes in subjects including anatomy, neuroscience, developmental biology, and research ethics.
In 2010, Dr. Litwack was awarded an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship in NCI’s Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research. During this fellowship, he led several efforts to develop policy and programs to advance the use of biobanking for personalized medicine. At the completion of this fellowship in 2012, he joined the FDA as a science policy analyst on the Personalized Medicine Staff in the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health. At FDA, Dr. Litwack developed policies and procedures for the review of companion diagnostics, investigational lab tests, and genomic technologies. In addition to authoring several policy guidances, Dr. Litwack was the FDA lead for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative and the FDA’s representative to the Roundtable on Genomics and Precision Health at the National Academies of Sciences.
Dr. Litwack received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Biology from MIT, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.