Team

Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Director

Dr. Afeyan is Managing Partner and CEO of Flagship Ventures, a firm that manages over $600 million in early-stage funds across the sectors of Therapeutics, Life Science, and BioEnergy/Cleantech. A technologist, entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Dr. Afeyan has co-founded and helped build over 20 successful life science and technology start-ups during the past two decades. He is a director and co-founder of Flagship portfolio companies Affinnova, BG Medicine, Ensemble Discovery, Genstruct, Helicos BioSciences (NASDAQ:HLCS), Joule Unlimited, and LS9. Previously he was a member of the founding team, director and investor in several successful ventures including Chemgenics Pharmaceuticals, Color Kinetics, Antigenics, EXACT Sciences and Adnexus Therapeutics


Brian Baynes, Ph.D., Director and CEO

Dr. Baynes is a Partner at Flagship Ventures, where he focuses on creating and managing new ventures within the firm’s VentureLabs unit.  He is working on leveraging a new model for distributed innovation to enable early stage ventures to develop significantly more value with limited capital.  In addition to his work with Celexion, Dr. Baynes is co-founder and Director of Midori Renewables, and has had a variety of operating and consulting roles with Codon Devices, Adnexus, Epitome Biosystems, and BG Medicine.  Before joining Flagship, Dr. Baynes was an engineer in process automation and composition modeling at Mobil Oil and a Director in the MIT School of Chemical Engineering Practice at Mitsubishi Chemicals and General Mills.  His doctoral research in protein stabilization at MIT was recognized with the WH Peterson Award from the American Chemical Society and the Timasheff Award from the University of Colorado.


Patrick Gallagher, Manager, Business Development

Patrick heads up Business Development at Celexion and joins the team with a rich background in life sciences and commercial-stage assets.  Patrick previously was a Entrepreneurship Fellow with Flagship Ventures' VentureLabs unit, a business development intern with AMAG Pharmaceuticals, has emerging-market consulting experience with Singapore's Ministry of Health and originally started his career in sales and marketing with Pfizer, where he won many promotional awards.  Patrick holds an MBA and an MPH in International Policy from Boston University and a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University.


Marco A. Mena, Ph.D., Manager, Operations

Dr. Mena is our Manager of Operations.  Previously, he was in several roles at Codon Devices, across multiple areas of the business ranging from research to operations.  He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he developed methods for coupling computational design of proteins with library screening.  He also holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from MIT.


J. Andrew Rakestraw, Ph.D., Manager, Technology Development

Dr. Rakestraw is the Founding Scientist and Manager of Technology Development at Celexion.  He previously served as a scientific consultant in the start-up of the company.  Prior to that he worked as a protein engineer at Codon Devices, Inc.  Andy received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering at MIT where he developed yeast-based directed evolution platforms for the selection of hosts and proteins with better therapeutic protein expression profiles.  Andy also holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.


Harry Wilcox, Director

Harry is currently Chief Financial Officer and Partner, Flagship Ventures, and brings to Celexion a rich set of experiences and expertise in financial management, operations, fund management and strategy. His career spans 28 years and has involved many different roles and functions including Controller, CFO, Sr. VP BD and CEO. He has also served on several Boards of Directors. In addition to his corporate experience, Harry was previously CFO of two venture capital firms, Highland Capital Partners where he was the founding CFO and General Partner, and prior to that, Charles River Ventures.

During the last several years Harry has led an active consulting practice which included roles as interim CEO of two biotech companies; Thrasos Therapeutics and Biostrum. Prior to this, Harry was Executive Vice President, Chief of Finance and Corporate Development of Pyrosequencing, a publicly-held biotech company. Earlier, he had been the President and Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge NeuroScience, Inc. until its sale to CeNeS Pharmaceuticals, and before that Sr. VP Business Development and CFO of Cellcor.

As CFO and Partner at Flagship Ventures, Harry manages all financial operations and LP relations/fundraising. He also serves as a member of the investment team and plays a role as board member or advisor to select portfolio companies. Currently Harry also serves as a member of the board at Accuri and Seahorse Biosystems.