Asav Dharia

Asav Dharia is Director, Business Development at Flagship Pioneering. In his role, Asav works with the Pioneering Medicines leadership team and with Legal, Finance, and other teams across the Flagship ecosystem and portfolio companies to execute and manage partnerships between Pioneering Medicines, Flagship’s portfolio companies, and external biopharma partners. Along with helping establish crucial industry partnerships, Asav leads cross-functional project teams with the goal of negotiating and closing various types of partnering agreements. He is also responsible for creating and implementing effective business strategies and managing a business development portfolio of projects that align with organizational objectives. Asav joined Flagship in 2018 and was previously a Senior Consultant at The Stevenson Group, a life science executive search firm, where he developed strong market research and competitive intelligence frameworks for executive searches across all life science business units, functions, and therapeutic areas with companies ranging from start-up to big pharma competing in early, growth, and mature markets. Asav also consulted in New York as an Equity Research Analyst and Research Consultant across small biotechs and private equity firms.

Asav received his Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics from the University of Connecticut. Working in Dr. Craig Nelson’s lab, he created and successfully tested a gene duplication model in mammalian genomes that explains the retention of previously unexplained gene duplicates within the human genome using cutting-edge computational and wet-bench research. His graduate work was published in multiple peer-reviewed journals in genomics and stem-cell research. Asav co-founded a bioinformatics company with Dr. Nelson and a team of graduate students that developed a powerful discovery and analysis tool that seamlessly integrates with existing next-generation ‘omics platforms to extract informative biomarkers from very large and complex data sets. Asav holds a B.A. in Biotechnology with a minor in Economics from the University of Massachusetts.