Board of Directors

Noubar Afeyan, PhD

Chairman
Managing Partner, Flagship Ventures

Dr. Noubar Afeyan is a recognized technologist and entrepreneur, having founded and helped build several successful technology startups during the past 19 years. He currently serves as a Director for Flagship portfolio companies Affinnova, BG Medicine, Codon Devices, Adnexus Therapeutics, Ensemble Discovery, Genstruct and Helicos BioSciences.

Dr. Afeyan is a Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and is a frequent guest speaker at technology forums throughout the country. He has authored numerous scientific publications and patents. He is a member of the Board of Governors of Boston University Medical School, and is a member of several advisory boards including the Whitehead Institute at MIT, the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT's Media Lab. He is also a Board member of several economic development organizations aimed at rebuilding the former Soviet Republic of Armenia.

Prior to co-founding Flagship Ventures in 1999, Dr. Afeyan helped launch six highly successful new ventures. He was the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of PerSeptive Biosystems, a leader in the bio-instrumentation field. Dr. Afeyan also served as Chairman of the Board of ChemGenics Pharmaceuticals, a privately held company spun out of PerSeptive. After PerSeptive's acquisition by Applera Corporation, Dr. Afeyan was Applera's Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer. While at Applera, he initiated and oversaw the creation of Celera Genomics, a tracking stock subsidiary of Applera. He has also been a founding team member, investor and active board member/advisor of Antigenics, Color Kinetics and EXACT Sciences.

Dr. Afeyan earned his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal and his PhD in Biochemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alan Crane

President and CEO Tempo Pharmaceuticals
Venture Partner, Polaris Venture Partners

Mr. Crane is currently President and CEO of Tempo Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He has also been a venture partner at Polaris Ventures since April, 2002.  From 2002 until 2006, Mr. Crane was President and CEO of Momenta Pharmaceuticals.  He joined Momenta as the fifth employee and built the company into a public company, creating an advanced and diversified pipeline, entering into two strategic collaborations with the Sandoz division of Novartis, and raising $275 million.  Prior to this, Mr. Crane was senior vice president of global corporate development at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for leading Millennium's strategic partnering, mergers and acquisitions, and licensing activities, generating over $2 billion in partner funding and acquiring 19 development stage products.  Prior to Millennium, Mr. Crane was a marketing executive at Dupont-Merck and a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and Arthur D. Little.

Mr. Crane serves on the boards of Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Adnexus and Vaccinex and is a member of the board of Children's Hospital Trust and a founder and member of the board of the Autism Consortium.

He received his M.B.A. in 1992 and his B.A. summa cum laude and M.A. in 1986, all from Harvard University. Mr. Crane also attended Harvard Medical School from 1986 to 1988 before pursuing a business career.

Robert Langer, D. Sc.

Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Robert S. Langer is one of 14 Institute Professors (the highest honor awarded to a faculty member) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Langer has written over 860 articles in the medical and scientific fields. He also has over 500 issued or pending patents worldwide, one of which was cited as the outstanding patent in Massachusetts in 1988 and one of 20 outstanding patents in the United States. Dr. Langer's patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 100 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies; a number of these companies were launched on the basis of these patent licenses. He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration's SCIENCE Board, the FDA's highest advisory board, from 1995-2002 and as its Chairman from 1999-2002.

Dr. Langer has received over 140 major awards. In 2002, he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers and the world's most prestigious engineering prize, from the National Academy of Engineering. He is also the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award; 65 recipients of this award have subsequently received a Nobel Prize. Among the numerous other awards Dr. Langer has received are the Dickson Prize for Science (2002), Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003), the Harvey Prize (2003), the John Fritz Award (2003) (given previously to inventors such as Thomas Edison and Orville Wright), the General Motors Kettering Prize for Cancer Research (2004), the Dan David Prize in Materials Science (2005) and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (2005), the largest prize in the U.S. for medical research. In 1998, he received the Lemelson-MIT prize, the world's largest prize for invention for being "one of history's most prolific inventors in medicine." In 2006, Dr. Langer was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame. In 1989, Dr. Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and, in 1992, he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of very few people ever elected to all three United States National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) to ever receive this distinction.

Forbes (1999) and Bio World (1990) have named Dr. Langer as one of the 25 most important individuals in biotechnology in the world. Discover (2002) named him as one of the 20 most important people in this area. Forbes (2002) selected Dr. Langer as one of the 15 innovators worldwide who will reinvent our future. Time and CNN (2001) named Dr. Langer as one of the 100 most important people in America and one of the 18 top people in science or medicine in America. Parade Magazine (2004) selected Langer as one of six "Heroes whose research may save your life."

In addition to being a director of Wyeth, he has served at various times on 15 boards of directors and 30 Scientific Advisory Boards of such companies as Alkermes, Mitsubishi Pharmaceuticals, Warner-Lambert and Momenta Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Langer has received honorary doctorates from the ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the University of Liverpool (England), the University of Nottingham (England), Albany Medical College, the Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University and Uppsala University (Sweden).

Dr. Langer received his Bachelor's Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering.

Michael Cima, PhD

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Michael J. Cima is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.  He is author or co-author of over one hundred and eighty scientific publications, twenty-seven patents, and is a recognized expert in the field of materials processing.  He has been the principle investigator on several multimillion-dollar Defense research projects and many other sponsored research programs at MIT. 

Dr. Cima received the Norton chair at MIT in 1988 in the Materials Science and Engineering Department as an Assistant Professor.  He became Director of the Ceramics Processing Research Laboratory in 1989, received a tenured appointment from MIT in 1992, and was promoted to full Professor in 1995.  He was elected a Fellow of the American Ceramics Society in 1997 and has recently been awarded the Sumitomo Electric Industries Chair at MIT. 

Prof. Cima's recent research is primarily in four areas: advanced forming technology; ceramic thin film processing; MEMS devices for medical electronics and drug delivery; and high-throughput development methods for formulations of materials.  He is particularly interested in forming methods for complex macro and micro devices, including MIT's three-dimensional printing process.  His research group is one of the leaders in the development of chemically derived epitaxial oxide films for HTSC coated conductors.  They are also leaders in the field of particle-particle and particle-surface interactions.  Prof. Cima and collaborators are developing implantable MEMS devices for unprecedented control in the delivery of pharmaceuticals.  Most recently, his group has been working on methods to speed the development of materials systems that are based on complex formulations.  Finally, through his consulting work he has been a major contributor to the development of a high throughput system for discovery of novel crystal forms of pharmaceuticals.

Prof. Cima earned a B.S. in chemistry in 1982 (phi beta kappa) and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1986, both from the University of California at Berkeley. 

Douglas A. Levinson, PhD

Founding CEO, T2 Biosystems, Inc.
Partner, Flagship Ventures

Dr. Levinson joined Flagship in 2006, bringing over fifteen years of experience in the biotech industry to Flagship’s venture investment and new venture creation activities. At Flagship, Dr. Levinson is a member of the investment team and focuses on early-stage companies in the biotech industry.  He was Founding CEO of T2 Biosystems and he currently serves on the Board of Resolvyx.

Prior to Flagship, Dr. Levinson was with TransForm Pharmaceuticals since 2000 as part of its scientific founding-team along with Professors Bob Langer and Michael Cima of MIT.  As Vice President of Emerging Science and Technology, he led the design, development and implementation of TransForm's basic technology platforms and business model.  TransForm was acquired by Johnson & Johnson for $230 million in 2005.

Prior to TransForm, Dr. Levinson was a founding scientific team member with Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for establishing the company's early scientific program in Immunology/Inflammation, which he grew to the largest research effort at the company.  Before that, he was with Creative Biomolecules where he was responsible for the generation of synthetic single-chain antibody molecules.

Dr. Levinson holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University and a B.S. cum laude in Molecular Biology from the University of Massachusetts. He has authored numerous patents in the field of high-throughput platform technologies and molecular genetics and has published extensively in scientific journals.

John McDonough

Chief Executive Officer

John McDonough joined T2 Biosystems in 2007.  Prior to joining T2, Mr. McDonough was President of Cytyc Development Corporation and had responsibility for designing and executing Cytyc Corporation’s acquisition and investment strategy for growing the company from a single product company with revenue of approximately $300 million in 2003 to a company with revenue of approximately $750 million from multiple products in 2007. In total, Cytyc acquired five companies totaling over $1 billion in acquisitions and also entered into alliances and investments with several early stage companies.  John most recently led the efforts that resulted in Cytyc’s acquisition by Hologic, Inc. in October, 2007 for over $6 billion, representing almost a four times increase in Cytyc’s market cap over a four year period.  During Mr. McDonough’s tenure at Cytyc, he also had responsibility for Cytyc’s Research & Development, Operations and Regulatory functions. 

Mr. McDonough came to Cytyc after serving as co-founder, CEO and president at SoundBite Communications, a customer communications company which went public in 2007.  Previously, he was COO of Direct Hit Technologies, an Internet search engine company that was successfully acquired in January, 2000 for over $500 million, and CEO and President of Workgroup Technology, a publicly held company that developed and marketed product development management solutions.  Mr. McDonough also spent 10 years with Easel Corporation where he held the role of CFO, COO and then CEO of a start-up company that grew into a publicly held company in 1990 and which was acquired in 1995. 

Mr. McDonough is a Certified Public Accountant and was a Senior Accountant with Deloitte, Haskins and Sells after graduating magna cum laude from Stonehill College in 1981.