John Flavin was placed as the chief financial officer of Endotronix in Lisle, Illinois. Founded in 2007, Endotronix is a medical device and technology startup that developed the Cordella™ Heart Failure System, a novel, cloud-based medical technology designed to help the nearly six million people in the U.S. who experience heart failure through earlier intervention, reducing incidences requiring hospital stays and ultimately reducing overall costs to the healthcare system. Endotronix has been honored as a “FierceMedTech Fierce 15” company and was a Distinguished Award winner in the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE, a worldwide competition identifying the most innovative technology.
In his role as CFO, John will lead the overall strategic financial function of the company, driving financial performance, investor relationships, and fundraising initiatives to support the commercialization of the business. As a key member of the senior management team, he will be charged with increasing the company’s ability to anticipate business issues and driving strategic decision-making in preparation for scaling the business in a meaningful way for growth.
John is a healthcare leader recognized for his contribution to the startup and incubation of biotech and medtech technologies across the Midwest. He has successfully leveraged his prior experience in capital raising and the medical device and biopharmaceuticals sectors to take companies through IPO and to help innovative technologies get to market. John is a board member of the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition, and sits on Governor Bruce Rauner’s Illinois Innovation Council, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s ChicagoNEXT technology council, and the City of Chicago’s Small Business Advisory Committee.
In his most recent position as the associate vice president of entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Chicago, John led the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which brings together the university’s nationally recognized programs in venture creation and education, technology commercialization, and business incubation, in order to provide faculty and other scholars with the resources and support to transform their groundbreaking ideas and discoveries into products, services, and new ventures that provide novel solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
John began his career as the co-founder of MediChem Life Sciences, a drug discovery and development company offering chemistry and biology services to clients in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. He ultimately led all aspects of MediChem’s $54 million IPO on NASDAQ, subsequently selling the company and, together with his partner, spinning off the research program assets they had created into a new biopharmaceutical company called Advanced Life Sciences, which John also prepared for an IPO. In 2011, John created Chicago Innovation Mentors, a consortium of four Illinois universities and Argonne National Laboratory that was intended to catalyze faculty and student entrepreneurship. After growing the consortium to over 200 mentors and 80 ventures, he merged it with MATTER, the Chicago healthcare tech incubator that he also co-founded, providing life sciences mentoring to startup entrepreneurs. In 2013, John became the founding executive director of the Chicago Innovation Exchange, a startup and commercialization hub supporting University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and Marine Biological Laboratory faculty, principle investigators, and students, as well as local entrepreneurs. He drove the expansion of the Exchange into a 3,600-member campus with a $20 million innovation venture fund, and it subsequently became part of the Polsky Center.
John holds a bachelor’s degree in business from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and an MBA in finance from Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois. He is a member of the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition Board, Crain’s Chicago Business Tech 50, the Economic Club of Chicago, and Lewis University’s President’s Council of Regents. He has been named among Crain’s Chicago Business “Who’s Who in Chicago Business,” and has received the KPMB Illinois High Tech Award.
QLK’s Patti Hall led the search to recruit John to Endotronix, where his duties will begin on May 7, 2018.
