John Flavin launches Portal Innovations

The brainchild of John Flavin, a seasoned life sciences executive and entrepreneur with more than 25 years of industry experience in finance, operations, and innovation, Portal Innovations LLC is a new platform to seed and accelerate life sciences, medtech, and bioinformatics ventures.

“There is an increasing pipeline of talent and biomedical innovation emerging from Midwest universities and companies that have the potential to be novel products in the healthcare market. However, entrepreneurs need an ecosystem of strong business and science teams coupled with capital and lab space to move the innovation from proof of concept to commercialization,” says Raju Prasad Ph.D., senior biotechnology equity research analyst at William Blair. “Portal is well positioned to successfully address this opportunity.”

Aware of this emerging opportunity in the Midwest, Flavin created Portal Innovations to seed, build, and scale early stage ventures emerging from academic laboratories, companies and innovation hubs.

To Portal, John brings a strong track record of successful life sciences and medtech senior management experience and innovation expertise in both the start-up and established company setting. Most recently John served as CFO at Endotronix and helped them secure $70 million to fund their pivotal clinical program. In parallel, he cofounded Pyxis Oncology as founding chairman and helped the team raise a $22 million Series A round to launch its novel immuno-oncology antibody drug platform. Over his career, he has co-founded and scaled several life sciences companies as president and CFO including Advanced Life Sciences and MediChem Life Sciences and has also co-founded and led transformative life sciences incubators including MATTER and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago. John has successfully raised over $345 million of public, private and philanthropic capital including 2 NASDAQ IPOs to fund the development of these impactful organizations.

In addition to providing management expertise, team assembly, and other start-up resources, Portal is partnering with Trammell Crow Co., a leading real estate developer in the United States, to design and develop wet and dry lab space to support a carefully curated portfolio of early stage companies in the recently announced Fulton Labs complex in Fulton Market.