Christo Shalish

Christo Shalish joined Flagship Pioneering in 2024 as Senior Vice President of Business Development & Strategy, supporting several Flagship companies in business development and strategy.

Christo brings over two decades of deal-making and transaction experience, leading multiple transformational deals for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies involving novel platforms. Before joining Flagship, Christo served as Dicerna’s Vice President of Business Development and Alliance Management and drove deals with Novo Nordisk and Roche, before Novo Nordisk acquired Dicerna in 2021. Christo also held a leadership role in alliance management at Dicerna, overseeing the successful prosecution of several pharma collaborations, including those with Eli Lilly, Boehringer Ingelheim, Alexion, Alnylam, and others.  Christo stayed at Novo Nordisk before joining Frontier Medicines as Senior Vice President, Head of Business Development in 2022.

Before Dicerna, Christo spent time at Moderna, Warp Drive Bio, and Cubist Pharmaceuticals, now part of Merck, where he supported the Discovery organization in business development and led a team to expand Cubist’s research focus into pain.   Christo was previously the first employee at ActivBiotics, a company investigating the intersection between bacterial pathogens and chronic disease, and a bench scientist at the Molecular Neurogenetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Christo received his MBA from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and undergraduate degree in biology from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.