Larry Mattheakis

Biography

Dr. Larry Mattheakis is currently Vice President of Biology at Protagonist Therapeutics. At Protagonist, he leads preclinical in vivo and in vitro pharmacology for gut restricted peptide therapeutics. His group has also developed a variety of clinical and preclinical biomarkers for target engagement and pharmacodynamics. He has over 20 years of experience developing small molecule and peptide based therapeutics. Previously at Exelixis, he led preclinical development of XL499- a small molecule inhibitor of PI3K delta for treating autoimmune and oncology diseases that was licensed to Merck. Prior to Exelixis, he led a multidisciplinary group at Cytokinetics that built an automated cellular phenotyping technology for predicting hepatotoxicity. Dr. Mattheakis began his career at Affymax, where he first pioneered development of ribosome display for screening large peptide libraries and applied the technology to several cytokine targets, including agonists of the thrombopoietin receptor. He has extensive experience in cell biology and receptor signaling pathways and is the author of numerous publications and inventor on key patents. Dr. Mattheakis received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and trained as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Research Interest

 Microbiology