Rahul Ballal

Rahul earned his PhD in biochemistry at Georgetown University School of Medicine and is a Cosmos Scholar. He holds an MS from Johns Hopkins in bioinformatics and his undergraduate degree, in biology, from Brown University. He is an auto enthusiast and loves traveling with his family.

Rahul is Chief Business Officer for Toronto-based Northern Biologics and also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in Boston at Versant Ventures. Rahul has worked to expand Versant's presence in the Northeast and strengthen the firm's access to academic medical centers in the region. Northern Biologics is part of Versant's portfolio, and is an innovative, discovery-stage therapeutic antibody company tackling cancer and fibrosis. 

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Previously, Rahul was VP of Business Development at Flexion Therapeutics, a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of non-opioid pain therapies, and was advancing a portfolio of injectable drug candidates. Rahul was also on the advisory board of Inception Sciences and Versant Ventures at the time. 

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Before that, Rahul was a business development manager at the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT. He worked with Broad scientists to start companies, raise venture funding, and license genomic technologies to pharma/biotech. During his PhD studies at Georgetown University School of Medicine, Rahul was a health economics consultant for Novo Nordisk and published findings on their NovoSeven therapeutic. 

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Before his graduate studies, Rahul was an associate with the seed biotech fund ASM Ventures and a volunteer analyst for Bio Ventures for Global Health (BVGH), a Gates Foundation not-for-profit. Before ASM, he was founder and CEO of a venture-backed startup where he raised $12M in venture financing and led the company to acquisition in 2002.

As a member of Class 15, Rahul served his fellowship at the Broad Institute/NVF under the mentorship of Dr.Gillian Isabelle and Dr. Reinhard Ambros (Novartis Venture Fund).