Spiros Liras

Spiros Liras is a venture partner at ATP, building on a career leading scientific innovation and discovery at some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Most recently, Spiros was with Biogen, where he established and led the External Portfolio Innovation unit within Research and Development. Prior to his employment at Biogen, Spiros was vice president of Medicinal Chemistry at Pfizer, where he led teams to deliver clinical pipelines in disease areas including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and neuroscience. Under his leadership, his divisions explored cutting edge drug discovery concepts including selective protein translation inhibition, design of macrocycles for drug discovery in tough target space, allosterism, and tissue targeting design strategies for the delivery of small molecule, oligonucleotide therapeutics and other modalities.

Spiros earned a PhD in organic chemistry from Iowa State University in 1990 and completed postdoctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently serves as adjunct full professor in the department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.