John Ballantyne

John Ballantyne is a founder of Agathos Biologics and a Partner in the Kineticos Disruptor Fund. He co-founded Aldevron with Michael Chambers in 1998 and was the Chief Scientific Officer from inception through to the end of 2021. His innovative work at Aldevron helped establish the company as the leading plasmid DNA CDMO in the world and as a provider of proteins, including gene-editing enzymes, and of mRNA across the spectrum of quality levels. Much of his time was spent focusing on development of nucleic acid-based countermeasures for highly lethal and weaponizable viral threats. John sees the advances in biotechnology providing opportunities for Agathos to enable ethical pharmaceutical development that will benefit patients, employees, and society. He also believes that the HDT Bio family of delivery platforms will help overcome some of the significant hurdles facing the optimization of nucleic acid biologicals for use in infectious disease and cancer in particular. Ballantyne received undergraduate degrees in Pharmacy from the Central Institute of Technology and the University of Otago in New Zealand. After beginning graduate school in New Zealand he transferred to the United States in 1994 and completed his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences at North Dakota State University.