Johan Wikstrom is the founder and CEO of Tolka AI Therapeutics. He brings a rare combination to phage therapy: personal experience with M. abscessus infection and eight years in machine learning at Google, where he built an AI product that grew from zero to over $500 million in revenue. Under his leadership, Tolka opened its FDA Expanded Access program, enrolled patients in its biobank, assembled the world's largest library of phages against M. abscessus, and established collaborations with more than ten institutions across the United States.
Dr. Hopkins is board-certified in internal medicine and infectious disease and has held clinical and product development positions over 30 years at FDA, Merck, Aeras, BARDA and multiple biotech companies. Prior to Tolka AI Therapeutics, Dr. Hopkins was the Chief Medical Officer at Adaptive Phage Therapeutics and Ocugen, where he led clinical development and medical affairs activities. He has approved multiple therapeutic and prophylactic products in the infectious disease space. He is passionate about finding solutions to difficult-to-treat infections, including those due to non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) and M. tuberculosis (TB).
Dr. Chaudhry is an interdisciplinary scientist with a PhD in Phage Therapy and four years of postdoctoral training in Phage Ecology and Evolution at Emory University. As Principal Scientist at Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, Dr. Chaudhry played a pivotal role in developing a phage bank for ESKAPE pathogens, process development, analytical testing, and advancing GMP-grade phage manufacturing.
Thomas is an experienced researcher, entrepreneur, and Thiel Fellow with extensive lab and leadership experience. His work spans cancer research, longevity, and microbiology workflow automation. At Parallel Health, he built a comprehensive phage-bacteria library, automated assays, and developed high-throughput systems that accelerated research efficiency.
Volodymyr combines expertise in software engineering, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Formerly a Senior Software Engineer at Google, he specialized in large-scale NLP systems. At Tolka, he develops software pipelines for genome analysis, protein structure prediction, and machine learning applications in phage therapy. He also develops and maintains Tolka's proprietary phage data platform.
