Gaston Matthyssens

Gaston Matthyssens, PhD, is a co-founder of Vesalius Biocapital and became Managing Partner in 2008. He has been chairman and non-executive director at several portfolio companies, including Fovea (acquired by Sanofi), Trinean (acquired by Unchained Labs), Amakem (licensed to RedX and pH Pharma), Apitope, Omeicos, Exact Imaging and Complix.

Gaston was a member of the management team of the first successful Ag-biotech company, Plant Genetic Systems, acquired by Hoechst Agrevo for USD 750m.

In 1997 Gaston became VP Business Development at the newly created Flanders Institute of Biotechnology where he participated in the creation of its first three spin-offs: deVGen (acquired by Syngenta), CropDesign (acquired by BASF) and Ablynx (acquired by Sanofi).

Gaston has a PhD in chemistry from the Free University of Brussels. He subsequently trained in the lab of three Nobel Laureates : Cesar Milstein and Fred Sanger at the MRC lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK) and was a member of the Susumu Tonegawa team at the Basel Institute of Immunology, Basel, Switzerland which discovered the genetic mechanism generating antibody diversity.