Alex Lugovskoy and the education of a company builder

Alex Lugovskoy once expected to become a physicist. Then, during a spring lecture, the green leaves outside began to compete rather successfully with the subatomic world being discussed inside. He remembers that moment as part of his turn toward biology. For someone whose subsequent career would involve so much deliberate construction, the early change of direction had a pleasingly untidy cause: something else had caught his attention.

Today he is the co-founder and chief executive of Diagonal Therapeutics in Watertown, Massachusetts. Between that classroom and this job sit a Harvard doctorate, four biotechnology employers, and a succession of responsibilities that gradually widened from scientific work to the workings of an entire organization. His biography is particularly interesting in the middle, where a scientist began acquiring the experience a founder would eventually need.

The founder title arrives relatively late. By then, Lugovskoy had already been responsible for development, operations, and the systems that help specialists work together. There is a considerable distance between understanding a molecule and understanding why two departments cannot agree on what should happen next. His career has required attention to both.

An education that kept expanding

Lugovskoy’s formal education begins with mathematics and physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, followed by a master’s in molecular biophysics. He earned his doctorate in biophysics at Harvard. The sequence brings together quantitative training and the study of living systems, a combination that would remain relevant as he moved into protein engineering.

Later came an Advanced Certificate for Executives in Management, Innovation and Technology from MIT Sloan. Place that qualification beside the doctorate and the developing shape of his career becomes easier to see. Scientific training provided one set of tools. Management study addressed a different set of responsibilities. Neither credential could do the work of the other.

At Biogen, where he worked from September 2001 to June 2010, he served as associate director of drug discovery. He then moved to Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, serving as vice president of therapeutics during his time there from June 2010 to January 2016. These were substantial stretches of professional life, long enough to experience the sustained work that follows an interesting initial result.

His next move brought a broader executive brief. In January 2016 he became chief development officer at Morphic. Discovery, development, operations: the titles chart an expanding field of responsibility. Read together, they describe a person repeatedly moving closer to the question of how an organization converts specialized knowledge into coordinated work.

The functions behind the founder

Morphic gives the clearest view of that widening brief. His responsibilities included building and leading technical operations, regulatory affairs, quality management, program and alliance management, information technology, data science, and business development. The list is worth reading slowly. It reaches well beyond the laboratory and into much of the infrastructure a growing scientific company needs.

These are departments that rarely get a flattering close-up in a founder portrait. Information technology tends to become visible when it fails. Quality management asks people to document things they would sometimes prefer simply to finish. Alliance management involves keeping work moving across organizational boundaries. The responsibilities are practical, persistent, and difficult to compress into an inspiring sentence.

They also make the later CEO appointment less mysterious. A founder who has worked across these functions has encountered the company from several directions. A promising idea must share space with schedules, procedures, partnerships, and systems. Lugovskoy’s operating record puts those obligations inside his story from well before Diagonal existed.

Dragonfly announced his arrival as chief operating officer in November 2020. Its co-founder and CEO, Bill Haney, pointed to his experience and accomplishments as reasons for bringing him aboard. Having spent years moving work forward at Morphic, Lugovskoy was taking on another role in which scientific understanding and organizational execution had to meet.

A company of his own, with company

In 2022, Lugovskoy co-founded Diagonal with Atlas Venture. The partnership is central to the company’s origin. Michael Gladstone, an Atlas partner, became its board chair. Seed backing came from Atlas, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Velosity Capital. The new organization began with a scientific proposition and a group of investors willing to help establish it.

There is also the matter of the name. Lugovskoy has described a weekend spent testing possibilities and discovering that many appealing choices already belonged to someone else. Diagonal survived the process. Its letters draw on digital, agonist, antibody, and ligand. Company naming, apparently, offers even a trained scientist an opportunity to become closely acquainted with disappointment.

The public introduction followed on April 3, 2024, with $128 million in financing. BVF Partners and Atlas co-led the Series A. The investor group also included Lightspeed, RA Capital Management, Frazier Life Sciences, Viking Global Investors, Velosity, and Checkpoint Capital. Diagonal’s emergence brought a wider circle of organizations around the venture Lugovskoy had helped start two years earlier.

A founding date and a launch date tell different parts of a company’s history. Here, the interval matters. Incorporation came first; the public announcement followed after the organization had begun its work. To read only the financing headline would be to enter Lugovskoy’s story several chapters after he had started writing it.

What a colleague notices

The operating titles explain what he was responsible for. Former colleagues supply a more personal view of how he approached it. Stanton Young, who reported to him at Dragonfly, describes a manager who listened with empathy, offered thoughtful feedback, and placed proposed solutions in the context of the organization’s goals.

Young’s account gets unusually specific about meetings. Lugovskoy summarized discussions into actions, assigned work to himself as well as to others, and followed up. These are modest details with considerable explanatory power. Anyone can leave a meeting with an impression of momentum. A list of commitments makes it possible to discover whether anything actually moved.

Young also credits him with helping develop his management skills, including recruitment, performance management, and handling conflict. Another former direct report, Laura Asinas Blackburn, emphasizes support, kindness, humor, and humility alongside scientific knowledge and hard work. These are colleagues’ assessments, rooted in their experience of working with him.

Together, their accounts suggest a leadership style attentive to the person doing the work as well as the work itself. The recurring details are listening, guidance, and follow-through. They give some human texture to a biography otherwise crowded with institutions and titles. They also make the move into company building feel less like a sudden reinvention.

“I joined Atlas to do Diagonal.”

Alex Lugovskoy

A seat at several tables

His professional life also extends beyond his own company. Valink Therapeutics appointed him to its board in 2023 and named him to its scientific advisory board in December 2024. The combination places him in both organizational oversight and scientific discussion. Valink’s current team page lists him in both capacities.

Atlas now lists him as an advisor. Earlier biographies described him as an entrepreneur-in-residence, reflecting his connection to the firm during Diagonal’s formation. These roles belong to the wider setting of his career: a network of companies, investors, and scientific colleagues, with responsibilities that vary according to the table at which he is sitting.

He has also worked as an editor at mAbs, participated in scientific conferences, and served on The Antibody Society’s board. In 2025, the society introduced him as a longtime member and former director. His 2024 appearance at The Antibody Series in Madeira put him among researchers discussing computation, design, and experimental work.

Atlas credits him with more than 100 patents and manuscripts, a combined figure encompassing invention and publication. The distinction matters: it is a record of activity across two forms of scientific contribution. Alongside the executive appointments, it keeps the scientist visible. Becoming responsible for an organization has added to his professional identity without erasing the work that brought him there.

The next job is building the team

January 2026 brought another financing milestone: an oversubscribed $125 million Series B co-led by Sanofi Ventures and Janus Henderson Investors. Existing investors participated alongside new backers, and Sanofi Ventures partner Paulina Hill joined the board. The company’s circle of financial and governance relationships had expanded again.

In May, Diagonal appointed Jonathan Piazza as chief financial officer. Lugovskoy emphasized Piazza’s experience in strategic capital formation and helping organizations through important stages of development. The appointment is a useful recent detail because it shows the company continuing to assemble the capabilities around its scientific work.

That task has a familiar shape in Lugovskoy’s career. At Morphic, the responsibility included building functions. At Dragonfly, it included operations. At Diagonal, it includes choosing the colleagues and structures through which the company will work. Each stage has required a wider view of what the organization needs from him.

The resulting portrait has room for the scientist, the operator, and the colleague who leaves a meeting with actions of his own. The career has accumulated those roles over time. For the student whose attention once wandered toward the green leaves outside, curiosity eventually led to a job with an unusually broad assignment: building an organization capable of pursuing it.