Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine
Dr. Nolan is the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He trained with Leonard Herzenberg (for his Ph.D.) and Nobelist Dr. David Baltimore (for postdoctoral work for the first cloning/characterization of NF-κB p65/ RelA and the development of rapid retroviral production systems). He has published over 300 research articles and is the holder of 40 US patents, and has been honored as one of the top 25 inventors at Stanford University.
Dr. Nolan is the first recipient of the Teal Innovator Award (2012) from the Department of Defense (a $3.3 million grant for advanced studies in ovarian cancer), the first recipient of an FDA BAAA, for “Bio-agent protection” grant, $3million, from the FDA for a “Cross-Species Immune System Reference”, and received the award for “Outstanding Research Achievement in 2011” from the Nature Publishing Group for his development of CyTOF applications in the immune system. Dr. Nolan has new efforts in the study of Ebola, having developed instrument platforms to deploy in the field in Africa to study Ebola samples safely with the need to transport them to overseas labs (funded by a new $3.5 million grant from the FDA) and another grant to study the effects of Zika and Ebola viruses on humans (also from the FDA).
Dr. Nolan is an outspoken proponent of translating public investment in basic research to serve the public welfare. Dr. Nolan was the founder of Rigel Inc. (NASDAQ: RIGL), and Nodality, Inc. (a diagnostics development company), BINA (a genomics computational infrastructure company sold to Roche Diagnostics), Founder of Apprise (sold to Roche Sequencing Solutions), co-Founder of Ionpath, co-Founder of Akoya, and serves on the Boards of Directors of several companies as well as consults for other biotechnology companies. DVS Sciences, on which he was Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board, recently sold to Fluidigm for $207 million dollars (2014) on an investment of $14 million. Dr. Nolan is a member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Stanford.
His areas of research include hematopoiesis, cancer and leukemia, autoimmunity and inflammation, and computational approaches for network and systems immunology. Dr. Nolan’s recent efforts are focused on a single cell analysis advance using a mass spectrometry-flow cytometry hybrid device, the so- call “CyTOF” and the “Multiparameter Ion Beam Imager” (MIBI) developed by Dr. Mike Angelo in his lab (Dr. Angelo is now an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Pathology at Stanford). The approaches use an advanced ion plasma source to determine the levels of tagged reagents bound to cells—enabling a vast increase in the number of parameters that can be measured per cell—either as flow cytometry devices (CyTOF) or imaging platforms for cancer (MIBI). Further efforts with another imaging platform termed CODEX (Akoya, Inc.) that inexpensively converts fluorescence scopes to high dimensional imaging platforms.
Dr. Nolan’s efforts are to enable a deeper understanding not only of normal immune function, trauma, pathogen infection, and other inflammatory events but also detailed substructures of leukemias and solid cancers and their interactions with the immune system—which will enable wholly new understandings that will enable better management of disease and clinical outcomes.
