General Partner. Gaston Matthyssens held senior management positions in several biotech companies including Plant Genetic Systems, Ghent, Belgium, one of the most successful agro-biotech companies to date, and Corvas Inc., San Diego, a drug design company. In 1997 he became Business Development Manager for the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, Ghent, Belgium, where he identified mature intellectual property and conceptualized new businesses around it. He was responsible for raising venture capital, negotiating valuations and closing the seed round investments for three biotech companies: Devgen, CropDesign and AbLynx.
After obtaining his Ph.D. from the Free University of Brussels, he worked for five years in the laboratories of two Nobel Prize winners, Dr. Susumu Tonegawa at the Basel Institute of Immunology and Dr. Cesar Milstein at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.