The Heart Has Its Own Intelligence
Tassos Gianakakos doesn't announce his next move. He just makes it. When Bristol Myers Squibb acquired MyoKardia - the cardiovascular precision medicine company he co-founded and led as CEO - for $13.1 billion in October 2020, most founders would have taken a long exhale. He was "shown the door," as he put it, with characteristic lightness, and immediately started thinking about what comes next.
What came next was Kardigan. Co-founded in 2023 with Jay Edelberg and Bob McDowell - the same core leadership team from MyoKardia - Kardigan launched publicly in January 2025 with $300 million in Series A funding and a pipeline of three late-stage cardiovascular drugs. By October 2025, the company had added another $254 million in a Series B backed by Fidelity Management & Research and T. Rowe Price. Total raised: $554 million. Time elapsed since launch: nine months.
The pattern is not accidental. Gianakakos has been building, buying, and exiting biotech companies since the late 1990s. He helped spin Codexis out of Maxygen in 2001, led the business through to its IPO, then moved to MAP Pharmaceuticals as Chief Business Officer before Allergan acquired it in 2013. MyoKardia, the company he is best known for, was where precision medicine finally met the heart - and where he spent eight years turning a thesis about cardiac biology into one of the largest biotech acquisitions ever.
"In many ways, CVD is where oncology was 20 years ago - there were no precision medicines and non-specific treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation were used regardless of cancer type."
- Tassos Gianakakos, Co-founder & CEO, KardiganThat analogy shapes everything he does. The cardiovascular space has long been treated as a monolith - statins for everyone, beta-blockers for everyone - while cancer treatment has fragmented beautifully into molecular subtypes and targeted therapies. Gianakakos is making the same bet in cardiology: that the heart, too, has its own intelligence, and that understanding it genetically and mechanistically will yield drugs that work dramatically better for specific patient populations.
Kardigan: Cardiac Intelligence as a Drug Factory
Kardigan is not your standard biotech. Its founding premise - "cardiac intelligence" - is a synthesis of real-world patient data, AI analysis, and deep cardiovascular biology applied to drug discovery. When Kardigan acquired Prolaio in March 2025 (Gianakakos's own prior company, which had been building a cardiac clinical intelligence platform), the move merged a live data layer with an active drug pipeline. Two separate efforts, one integrated machine.
The company is headquartered in Menlo Park with operations in South San Francisco and Princeton, and by October 2025 had grown to approximately 120 people. It operates three late-stage programs, each targeting a different corner of cardiovascular disease with a drug matched to the specific biological mechanism driving it.
Gianakakos's bet: biopharma companies need to "fundamentally embrace real-world data and AI-based tools in a way that is fully integrated across R&D." Kardigan was built as proof of that thesis from day one - not a retrofit of an old model, but a new architecture for drug discovery.
The Pipeline
How He Built MyoKardia - and Sold It for $13.1 Billion
MyoKardia was founded on a single, counterintuitive observation: that many forms of heart disease are fundamentally genetic, and that targeting the underlying molecular mechanism - rather than managing symptoms - could change outcomes for patients who had no other options.
The centerpiece drug was mavacamten, a cardiac myosin inhibitor designed specifically for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) - a genetic condition where the heart muscle grows abnormally thick, obstructing blood flow. Traditional treatments managed the downstream symptoms. Mavacamten went upstream, quieting the overactive myosin that causes the thickening in the first place.
Bristol Myers Squibb's acquisition of MyoKardia in October 2020 valued the company at $13.1 billion in cash. The deal - one of the largest in biotech that year - required negotiation. BMS's initial bid reportedly came in lower; the final price of $225 per share reflected the scientific value the company had built over eight years. Mavacamten was subsequently FDA-approved as Camzyos in 2022 and is now available to HCM patients in the US.
After the acquisition closed, Gianakakos was out. "I started thinking about this pretty much the day after BMS bought MyoKardia," he said, "because I was... shown the door." The ellipsis is part of the story. There was no long farewell tour.
"The heart is a fount of information."
- Tassos GianakakosThirty Years of Building Things That Work
One Size Fits Nobody
The philosophy at the core of everything Gianakakos has built: most patients with cardiovascular disease are being treated with drugs designed for someone else. Not their genetic subtype, not their specific disease mechanism. Just a drug that works on average, for a population that is defined statistically rather than biologically.
"Our approach is transformative," he has said. "Approaches today are one size fits all. For many diseases we're targeting, there are no approved therapies in the U.S., and all patients are treated with drugs approved for other conditions."
Kardigan's "cardiac intelligence" platform - built in part through the Prolaio acquisition - is the infrastructure that makes precision matching possible. High-density real-world patient data analyzed with AI tools allows the company to identify which patients carry which disease drivers, match them to the mechanisms its drugs target, and design clinical trials around patient subpopulations where the treatment effect is most likely to be meaningful. It's the oncology playbook. It's just being applied to the heart, twenty years later.
"Our approach is transformative. Approaches today are one size fits all. For many diseases we're targeting, there are no approved therapies in the U.S., and all patients are treated with drugs approved for other conditions."
- Tassos GianakakosGreek Roots, MIT Rigor, Mediterranean Table
Tassos Gianakakos is the son of Greek immigrants - a detail that surfaces quietly in both his name and his lifestyle. He is a committed advocate of the Mediterranean diet, citing olive oil, Greek salad, antioxidant-rich foods, and the occasional glass of red wine as his personal approach to the very disease he is working to cure. He avoids processed food and stays physically active.
The name "Kardigan" is itself a signal: a portmanteau of "kardia" - the Greek word for heart - and a nod to the precision and sophistication the company aspires to. It is both technically descriptive and personally resonant. That kind of detail is not accidental in a founder who holds degrees in chemical engineering, economics, and biotechnology, and who trained at three of the most demanding institutions in the world.
He serves as a Director at LianBio and as a Strategic Advisor at Evelo Biosciences, alongside John Maraganore. His board at Kardigan includes Paul Berns (ARCH Venture Partners), Doug Giordano (Perceptive Advisors), David Meeker, and Kim Popovits - a roster that reflects both the company's scientific ambition and its institutional credibility.