Pavel Khrimian

Pavel Khrimian is Co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Deka Biosciences. He moved from pharma business development into entrepreneurship and co-founded the company from inception. He spent most of 2026 leading Deka Biosciences through a wind-down after a pharma collaboration collapsed at the diligence stage. He describes himself as an operator and biotech company builder, and intends to build again.

Pavel Khrimian co-founded Deka Biosciences and built it from inception. He raised approximately eighty million dollars, built a team of thirty-five, and advanced a lead asset into phase one with a second program in IND-enabling work. That work ended in 2026, when the company wound down.

Pavel Khrimian works from three questions he uses to separate a pivot from a closure, a framework he set out on Open Door Salon. He treats the common failure as a company ignoring its own signals: “what I have seen done not so successfully is when some data points are ignored”. He also holds that execution carries no guarantee, since a company can do everything right and still miss the outcome it wanted.

Pavel Khrimian argues that the obligation to patients survives the company. Patients on therapy stay on therapy, which turns a wind-down into an operational problem of narrowing sites and continuing to ship drug while cost is cut everywhere else. On Open Door Salon he framed it as a duty: “We have the fiduciary responsibility to continue to treat these patients until they come off therapy.”

Pavel Khrimian negotiated for months, finalized a term sheet and completed diligence before the counterparty changed direction, which is what triggered the Deka Biosciences wind-down. He is clear that conduct on the way out mattered to him and that the relationships were kept intact, because the industry is small and the same people meet again: “we didn’t burn bridges along the way. It’s an ecosystem. It’s a small world.”