The VIC Fellows Program offers experienced professionals the opportunity to learn how to identify and evaluate high-potential innovations from around the world. We’re proud to showcase the members of the 2026–2026 Fellows class through a series of interviews, including this recent conversation with Anastasia Galochkina, MBA.
Please tell us a little bit about your background.You hold an MS in Biotechnology, an MBA in Finance, and a CFA charter. What inspired you to combine deep science with high-level finance, and how does that dual lens guide your investment approach?
My background is in investment. I've worked across public, private, and venture capital, at private equity groups and family offices in Europe and Russia, most recently as Director of Investments at Rigmora Holdings, where I led investments in science and technology companies from evaluation through to board governance. I hold an MS in Biotechnology and an MBA from Johns Hopkins, and I'm a CFA charterholder. I've recently joined VIC as a Fellow, and my focus now is on the earliest stage of life science, where a scientific idea first becomes a company.
You hold an MS in Biotechnology, an MBA in Finance, and a CFA charter. What inspired you to combine deep science with high-level finance, and how does that dual lens guide your investment approach?
My interest in deep science developed gradually, through the investment work itself. Early in my career I was drawn to businesses where technology was not simply improving an existing model but changing what was possible. I saw that first in financial services, as technology transformed how people accessed and used them.
The turning point came later, when I became involved in building an Oxford University spinout in cultivated meat. For the first time I was working on an investment where I could not form a view without understanding the underlying science, and I found that enormously engaging. The questions were no longer only about market, valuation, and execution, but about whether the biology itself was sound. That experience, together with the extraordinary pace of innovation in life science, led me to pursue an MS in Biotechnology and to focus increasingly on science driven companies.
I now see the finance background and the scientific training as complementary rather than separate. I still rely on everything investing taught me, including how to assess markets, business models, competitive dynamics, capital requirements, and returns. What has changed is where I apply it. I now work on companies that change how diseases are diagnosed and treated, and I can engage with the science behind them rather than take it on trust.
Your background ranges from multi-billion-dollar buyouts to early-stage venture building. What is the biggest mindset shift when moving from late-stage private equity to seed-stage biotech?
In late stage private equity you usually have a product, customers, a revenue history, and a market you can analyse. The central question is how much further the business can grow and what has to happen to create additional value.
At seed stage, and especially in biotech, far less is given. You may have compelling science but no product history, no established market, and sometimes no evidence yet that the market will adopt what is being built. So the work starts much earlier. That is a harder kind of judgment, and I find it more interesting for exactly that reason. In private equity you are mostly refining a view of something that already exists. Here you are deciding whether something should exist at all.
Bridging the gap between the lab and the market is notoriously tough. When evaluating early-stage technologies, what key indicators tell you a breakthrough is ready for commercial scale?
For a device or a tool, commercial scale is something you can point at. For a therapeutic it is far away, since the product only reaches a market once clinical development is complete. Decisions have to be made long before that, and at each stage there is a particular gating event that determines whether the program moves forward.
So the useful question is not whether something is ready for commercial scale, but what has to be true to justify the next stage. That is fairly unique to each program, but the shape is usually similar. Early on it might be evidence the mechanism holds up in a relevant model rather than only in the founders' own system. Later it becomes the ability to produce the material at the required quality, then the safety package, then the first signal in patients. Each stage has its own bar, and each one costs more than the last.
What I look for in all of them is whether the claimed advantage holds up outside the conditions the team fully controls, and whether the result can be reproduced rather than achieved once. A finding that depends on a single batch or a single pair of hands is not yet a product.
Given your extensive board governance experience, what is one major operational or structural pitfall early-stage life science founders should avoid?
Early stage ventures often carry several layers of uncertainty at once. The science may still need validation, the product concept may be evolving, the regulatory path may be unclear, and the market may not yet be defined. It is very easy to start chasing all of them simultaneously.
The better approach is to identify the few questions that are genuinely consequential and sequence the company around proving them. What has to be demonstrated before the next major commitment of capital, and which uncertainty can wait?
From a board perspective this discipline is critical, because it shapes capital allocation, hiring, timelines, and ultimately survival. A company can spend a great deal of money-making progress on secondary issues while the core technical or translational risk remains unresolved.
What drew you to the VIC Fellows Program, and how has working with the VIC ecosystem helped shape your approach to building high-impact ventures?
My background gave me extensive experience evaluating companies and investment opportunities, but venture creation starts earlier. It requires deciding which scientific ideas are worth pursuing, how to test them, when to stop, and how financing constraints shape those decisions from the very beginning. That is the exposure I wanted, and VIC offered a very practical environment for it.
I am still early in the program, but it is already changing the way I think. I am learning how opportunities are screened, how scientific merit is weighed alongside market need and financing requirements, and how teams decide which projects deserve further time and capital.
What I find especially valuable is seeing this as a system rather than a single investment decision. It is moving me from evaluating ventures once they are formed toward understanding how strong ventures are selected and built in the first place.
Looking ahead at the life science and deep tech landscape, what emerging technology or industry trend are you most excited to explore during your time with VIC?
The area I am most interested in exploring is personalized medicine. Scientifically, the field is moving toward therapies increasingly tailored to individual patients, through RNA, cell-based approaches, targeted delivery, and other platform technologies. What interests me just as much is that this shift cannot happen without changes across the entire development and commercialization model.
Traditional drug development assumes large patient populations, standardized manufacturing, and relatively uniform products. Personalized therapies challenge every one of those assumptions. Development cycles, manufacturing, quality control, delivery, reimbursement, and go to market strategy all have to evolve for these therapies to become commercially viable at scale. The opportunity here is not concentrated in a single technology. It is an ecosystem problem, and the companies that solve the enabling bottlenecks may prove just as important as the therapies themselves.