Nicholas Plugis

Nicholas “Nick” Plugis is an Origination Partner at Flagship Labs, the innovation foundry of Flagship Pioneering, where he leads teams of entrepreneurial scientists to found new companies. A scientist, inventor, and company builder, Nick focuses on creating transformative platforms at the intersection of underexplored biology, machine learning, chemical biology, and emerging enabling technologies.

Since joining Flagship, Nick has helped create and shape multiple Flagship-founded companies, including Cellarity, Ampersand Biomedicines, Sail Biomedicines, Abiologics, and Ring Therapeutics. Across these efforts, he has worked to translate bold scientific hypotheses into new therapeutic platforms and company concepts. At Cellarity, Nick served as Chief Innovation Officer, where he created and led the company’s Drug Design Studio and helped pioneer cell-centric chemical design capabilities integrating chemical biology, single-cell technologies, and machine learning.

Nick is an inventor on multiple patents and an author of multiple scientific publications. He has also been recognized by Business Insider as one of 12 serial entrepreneurs building the next generation of biotech startups. His work reflects a longstanding commitment to combining deep biological insight with powerful computational and experimental tools to create new ways of understanding and treating disease.

Nick earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University, where he worked with Chaitan Khosla as part of Stanford ChEM-H and developed chemical biology tools to investigate the molecular pathophysiology of celiac disease. He completed the Stanford Graduate School of Business Ignite Program and holds a B.A. in chemistry and economics from Middlebury College.