Dr. Michael T. Flavin manages corporate and academic partnerships and real estate operations for Discovery Partners Institute.
He also serves as Managing Director of Flavin Ventures, an early-stage venture incubator focused on starting, financing, and developing biotechnology companies. Dr. Flavin has been CEO of Shamrock Structures, a drug discovery services company he founded in 2003 to provide pharmaceutical researchers with access to technologies and expertise to accelerate their lead compound discovery programs.
He has been Chairman & CEO of Advanced Life Sciences, a biopharmaceutical company he founded in 1999 focused on the development of new drugs to fight infection, inflammation, and cancer. Advanced Life Sciences completed a $35M IPO in 2005 and, subsequent to that, completed a $25 million PIPE in 2006 and a $20 million PIPE in 2007 to advance drugs through clinical trials, including Restanza™ (cethromycin), a novel once-a-day oral antibiotic in NDA-stage development for the treatment of respiratory tract infections including pneumonia.
In 1987, Dr. Flavin founded MediChem Life Sciences. He established MediChem as a premier drug discovery and development services company for the pharmaceutical industry. Over 14 years, MediChem grew from a two-person operation to more than 240 employees, serving over 90 clients in drug discovery, including most of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and many leading biotechnology firms. In 1999, Dr. Flavin and his team completed a $30 million equity and debt venture capital round. In 2000, he oversaw the acquisition and integration of ThermoGen, a protein expression company, and Emerald Biostructures, a structural biology company, as MediChem subsidiaries. In 2000, MediChem completed a $54 million IPO. In 2001, Dr. Flavin oversaw the construction of a 110,000 square foot laboratory and office building in Woodridge, Ill., to house MediChem operations. MediChem was acquired in 2002 by deCODE genetics (NASDAQ: DCGN) to build a complete “gene map to drug” business model.
Dr. Flavin has 49 publications in scientific journals and 20 U.S. patents in the fields of organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and biochemistry. He has been awarded several grants from the National Institutes of Health to further his research in anti-infective and anti-cancer drug discovery.
Dr. Flavin is a frequent lecturer on topics related to scientific entrepreneurship at universities such as Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He is the recipient of several awards, including the Alumnus of the Year Award in 2018 from the University of Illinois College of Pharmacy, the Charles D. Hurd Lectureship at Northwestern University, the Sr. Margaret Wright Graduate Award from the University of Illinois, the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame and the Year 2000 Illinois High Tech Award.
Dr. Flavin received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Notre Dame and his Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry from the University of Illinois Chicago. After completing his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Baxter prior to founding MediChem.