Daphne Karydas

Daphne Karydas is the president and chief financial officer of Flare Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing small-molecule drugs that target transcription factors. She joined Flare in 2021 and has more than twenty years of experience in biopharmaceutical finance, strategy, and dealmaking across both Wall Street and operating leadership.

Karydas earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began her career as a chemical engineer at Merck, in the company’s vaccine division, before earning an MBA and moving into finance. She spent roughly fifteen years on Wall Street, starting as a healthcare investment banker at Goldman Sachs and later working on the investment side as a portfolio manager and senior healthcare analyst, covering biotechnology companies from preclinical startups to large-cap firms.

She subsequently moved into operating roles, serving as senior vice president of corporate financial planning, analysis, and strategy at Allergan through its 2020 acquisition by AbbVie, and then as chief financial officer of Syndax Pharmaceuticals. At Flare Therapeutics she oversees finance and corporate strategy for a pipeline that includes a PPAR-gamma inhibitor for advanced bladder and urothelial cancers and an androgen-receptor program for prostate cancer, alongside a global discovery collaboration with Roche signed in 2024. She also serves on the boards of directors of COMPASS Pathways and Mineralys Therapeutics.

Karydas appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Konstantina (Tina) Katcheves, chief business and strategy officer at Acadia Pharmaceuticals, for a conversation on mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships in the life sciences. Drawing on her experience as both an investor and an operator, Karydas described the biopharmaceutical industry as a symbiotic ecosystem in which large companies supply infrastructure and capital while smaller, innovative companies supply new science, and explained why most transactions are years in the making.

Across the conversation she returned to the practical realities of getting deals done: the long relationship-building that precedes a transaction, the internal champions and stakeholders required to win buy-in, and the point at which deals most often collapse. In her experience, partnerships and licensing agreements are frequently harder to close than outright acquisitions, because the difficulty lives in the contract details rather than the headline terms.