Harith Rajagopalan MD, PhD, is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fractyl Health, a public metabolic therapeutics company. He trained in internal medicine and cardiology before entering the life sciences industry, where he has dedicated himself to discovering and developing therapeutic approaches to prevent and reverse metabolic disease. He joined Fractyl in 2011 when the Company completed its Series A financing.

Despite advances in care, both the number of people with obesity and type 2 diabetes and the associated clinical and economic consequences of these diseases continue to grow. Under Harith’s leadership, Fractyl is developing two novel product platforms that target root causes of obesity and type 2 diabetes. By targeting the root cause of these diseases, Fractyl plans to shift the treatment paradigm from chronic management with drugs like GLP-1s and insulin, to the prevention and remission of underlying disease.

The Company’s REVITA® system is an outpatient procedure designed to durably modify duodenal dysfunction, a major pathologic consequence of a high fat and high sugar diet, which can initiate obesity and type 2 diabetes. Revita uses heat energy to ablate the dysfunctional duodenal mucosa to restore normal metabolic signaling from the gut – thus getting to the root cause of disease. The device is currently in pivotal trials in obesity and type 2 diabetes. Rejuva® is Fractyl’s novel, locally administered, single-administration, adeno-associated virus (AAV)-delivered pancreatic gene therapy platform designed to enable long-term remission of obesity and type 2 diabetes by durably altering metabolic hormone function in the pancreatic islet cells of patients. Rejuva will enter first-in-human studies in the first half of 2025.

Since 2011, Fractyl has gone from a venture-backed startup co-founded by Harith and Jay Caplan, to a NASDAQ-listed company as of February 2024. The Company is based in Burlington, MA, with a footprint in Europe, and has more than 100 employees. Prior to starting Fractyl, Harith was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm based in Cambridge, MA.

Harith completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and his fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School prior to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he graduated in the Alpha Omega Alpha Honors society from the medical school. During his Ph.D. research with Dr. Bert Vogelstein, Harith had numerous publications in prestigious research journals including Nature and Science and won the Michael A. Shanoff Award at the University for his research into the molecular basis of colorectal cancers. Harith did his undergraduate work at Stanford University, where he graduated with a B.S. with Honors in Chemistry and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society during his junior year.