Raffi Afeyan

Raffi Afeyan is a Senior Principal at Flagship where he works as part of a team of entrepreneurial scientists exploring innovative ideas, developing the science, intellectual property, and business strategy that form the foundation of breakthrough startups and operationalizing them through their early stages. He currently serves as a founding team member and Head of Innovation and Strategy at Ampersand Biomedicines.

Before joining Flagship in 2021, Raffi held a variety of roles within Flagship ecosystem companies. Most recently, he was the VP of Product Strategy and Innovation at Cellarity and at Generate Biomedicines where he focused on exploring how their platforms could be applied to create value across potential program areas.

He was previously was the Senior Director of Strategic Innovation at Axcella where he led an internal exploration that motivated the company’s development of their current therapeutic modality of endogenous metabolic modulators (EMMs), ultimately leading to their IPO in 2019. He is an author on several published scientific articles, patents and notably is an inventor of Axcella’s two declared candidate drugs currently in clinical development for liver diseases. He previously completed the Flagship Pioneering Fellowship in 2014.

Raffi earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University working with Jim Collins. His works focused on applications of synthetic biology to create logic-based genetic machinery in bacteria to enable conditional decision making. Raffi also holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Chemical Engineering from McGill University