Nicholas Plugis

Nick is a Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering working on a venture-creation team to found and grow companies based on unappreciated biologies and new biotechnologies.

Nick’s work has led to the creation of several Flagship-founded companies including Ring Therapeutics (revolutionizing gene therapy with its commensal virome platform), Cellarity (designing medicines against the cell as opposed to a single molecular target), Laronde (pioneering endless RNA – eRNA™ – a new class of programmable medicines capable of expressing therapeutic proteins inside the body), and Ampersand Biomedicines (enabling potent mechanisms to treat disease by creating and programming therapeutics that are more efficacious). As the former Chief Innovation Officer at Cellarity, he created and led the company’s Drug Design Studio to pioneer new cell-centric chemical design capabilities that leverage systems biology, single-cell technologies and machine learning.

Before joining Flagship in 2017, Nick received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford, working with Chaitan Khosla as a part of the ChEM-H innovation hub. At Stanford, Nick built and used chemical biology tools to investigate the molecular pathophysiology of celiac disease. Nick completed the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Ignite Program and holds a B.A. in chemistry and economics from Middlebury College.

Nick’s work has resulted in multiple patents and publications. Nick was honored in 2021 in Business Insiders’ list of 12 serial entrepreneurs building the next generation of biotech startups.