He builds drugs the way an engineer builds machines: design, build, test, repeat — until a rare-disease patient actually gets better.
Most drug discovery starts with a hunch about a single molecule: hit this one target, fix the disease. The trouble is that bodies do not read the textbook. A drug touches hundreds of proteins at once, all of them wired together, and the tidy one-drug-one-target story collapses the moment it meets a real person. Richard Novak watched that collapse happen over and over - promising compounds sailing through preclinical work, then failing the patients who needed them most.
So at Unravel Biosciences, the company he co-founded and runs, he flipped the question on its head. Instead of asking what does this drug target? the company's BioNAV platform asks will this drug help an actual patient? first - then works backward through RNA networks to figure out why. It is a small inversion that changes everything downstream: which drugs get tested, which patients get matched, how fast a therapy reaches a clinic.
The targets he has chosen are not the crowded, lucrative ones. They are the rare neurological and metabolic diseases that larger companies walk past: Rett Syndrome, X-linked dystonia Parkinsonism, Okur-Chung Neurodevelopmental Syndrome. The kind of conditions where a single working treatment is the entire ballgame for a family.
Novak did not arrive here through a standard pharma career. He arrived as a tool builder - someone who, by his own admission, took an embarrassingly long time to notice that he saw every problem as an engineering problem. Genomics tests for turtles. A portable water filter for studying stream parasites. A nasal swab born in a three-day sprint. The instrument always came first; the company came later.
The biology came before the engineering. Novak grew up in the Czech Republic, the kind of childhood spent in forests - picking berries and mushrooms, gardening, hiking. Nature was the first lab. When the family immigrated to the United States, the affection for the outdoors came along, and it slowly hardened into a love of biology.
The turning point was a high-school project his father nudged him toward: an independent study of turtle migration using genetic sequencing. A teenager designing a custom genomics test for turtles is already, quietly, an engineer. That instinct followed him through a biology degree at Emory and a bioengineering PhD at UC Berkeley.
Then came the months in the Amazon rainforest, and a reckoning. He watched parasitic infections and disease tear through under-resourced communities, places where the distance between a sick person and a working treatment was measured in days that patients did not have. The lesson stuck: fast, efficient therapeutics are not a luxury. In remote places, speed is survival.
That field experience pushed him to co-found Future Scientist, a nonprofit teaching science and engineering so communities could tackle their own health challenges with whatever was locally on hand. It also doubled as an accidental business school. Fundraising, team building, logistics, marketing, the legal and accounting grind - he learned all of it building a nonprofit, years before he would need it to build a biotech.
His takeaway from those years was less about technique than about people: the value, as he puts it, of mentorship and generosity with time.
Before Unravel, Novak spent over 15 years as a Lead Engineer on the Advanced Technology team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. His patch was the hard, unglamorous machinery of modern biology: drug discovery programs, advanced disease models, the celebrated human Organ Chips, and the automation and sensor systems that make any of it run at scale.
Then March 2020 arrived, and the world ran out of nasal swabs. Novak and his colleagues did what tool builders do. They designed a 3D-printed swab in three days. Within a month it was injection-molded. Within two more, it was rolling off sterile production lines. That sprint became Rhinostics Inc., the sample-collection automation company he went on to direct.
It is the clearest snapshot of how he works: a problem with no available answer, attacked with an instrument nobody had built yet, shipped at a speed that makes the timeline read like a typo.
Novak co-founded Unravel in 2021 with Frederic Vigneault, who brought deep CRISPR experience from George Church's lab. Their shared frustration - the massive failure of translating preclinical results to actual patients - became the company's founding mandate: a fast-track path to the clinic.
RNA network analysis of patient transcriptomes redefines the disease by its molecular signature, not its label.
AI-driven discovery screens many drugs in parallel for real-world effect, then reverses to find the likely target.
Rapid preclinical screening in custom animal models, including Xenopus tadpoles, checks the bet quickly.
Efficient N-of-1 trials with frequent RNA sequencing measure whether one real patient is responding.
A proprietary formulation of an existing drug, advanced toward N-of-1 trials with frequent RNA sequencing to read each patient's response.
A novel small molecule built around Unravel's discovered Rett target, with potential reach into other CNS and metabolic diseases.
Additional programs in X-linked dystonia Parkinsonism, Okur-Chung Neurodevelopmental Syndrome, and bipolar disorder.
Novak hires for motivational alignment - the willingness to keep walking when the path gets ugly - then gets out of people's way while keeping the goals and resources clear. He is partial to motivated interns and early-stage staff for the fresh perspective they drag in the door.
His advice to other founders is bracingly unsentimental: prepare for repeated rejection and learn from it, surround yourself with problem-solvers rather than obstacle-spotters, and resist irrational optimism - pivot the moment the evidence says a path is dead.
His first genomics project was on turtles, not humans.
He calls himself a tool builder before a scientist or a CEO.
A nasal swab he co-designed in three days turned into an entire company.
Unravel's logic runs backward from most of pharma: helpful drug first, target second.
His research has leaned on Xenopus laevis tadpoles as a model organism.
His nonprofit, Future Scientist, was his real first startup - fundraising, legal, logistics and all.