Nicholas Galakatos, PhD
Managing Director
Nicholas Galakatos, PhD, has been Managing Director of Clarus Ventures since the firm's inception in 2005. Prior to Clarus, Dr. Galakatos was a General Partner at MPM Capital, a healthcare venture capital firm. He has over 25 years of industry and investment experience in the healthcare sector. From 1997 to 2000, Dr. Galakatos was Vice President of New Business at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (presently Takeda) and a member of the Management Team. During that time he co-founded Millennium Predictive Medicine and TransForm Pharmaceuticals, where he was the Chairman and founding CEO. Prior to Millennium he was at Venrock Associates focusing on early stage biotechnology investments. Prior to Venrock he was Head of Molecular Biology Research at Novartis (formerly Ciba).
Dr. Galakatos earned his PhD in Organic Chemistry from MIT and performed his post-doctoral studies at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Galakatos represents Clarus Ventures on the Board of Directors of Catabasis, Ophthotech, and Nanostring.
In addition, he is a Director of Portola. Dr. Galakatos is a member of the Director’s Council of the Koch Institute at MIT, and the Genetics Advisory Council at Harvard Medical School.
Previous directorships include Aveo (NASDAQ:AVEO), Caliper (NASDAQ:CALP), Critical Therapeutics (NASDAQ:CRTX), Link Medicine (acquired by Astrazenca), Millennium Biotherapeutics (acquired by Millennium), Millennium Predictive Medicine (acquired by Millennium), Syrrx (acquired by Takeda) and Taligen (acquired by Alexion). Also, he was the Chairman of TransForm (acquired by J&J) and Hypnion (acquired by Eli Lilly), and the Lead Director at Affymax (NASDAQ: AFFY).