David Pompliano

David Pompliano is a drug discovery entrepreneur.  Working with venture-capitalists and academicians, He focuses on creating scientifically precocious, game-changing new commercial enterprises based on cutting edge science and technology discovered in academia.

Pompliano is an Operating Partner of Accelerator Life Science Partners.  With Accelerator LSP and Gates Foundation backing, Pompliano co-founded Lodo Therapeutics in 2015 with Professor Sean Brady (Rockefeller University), and served as its Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) until September 2018.  Lodo Therapeutics is a New York City-based company focused on metagenomics-based discovery and synthetic biological manipulation of novel secondary metabolite biosynthetic pathways to produce new medicines.  Pompliano continues to work with Accelerator to ideate and build new biotechnology companies.

Pompliano has over 25 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry.  Prior to Lodo Therapeutics, he served as CSO of Revolution Medicines, a drug discovery company he co-founded while an Entrepreneur in Residence at Third Rock Ventures.  Before that, he was CEO of BioLeap, a platform technology-based biopharma company. Earlier, he served as a senior pharmaceutical executive at GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, where he led drug discovery teams that produced pre-clinical credentials for >30 development candidates and four registered anti-infective (Altabax) and oncology (Tykerb, Votrient, Promacta) drugs.  

Pompliano earned the BS and PhD degrees in Chemistry from the University of Virginia and from Stanford University, respectively, and conducted research in enzymology and molecular biology as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow in Jeremy Knowles’ laboratory at Harvard University.  He also is Principal and Owner at Sanderling Consulting LLC, where he assists investors, companies and philanthropies in setting drug discovery strategy, in executing the operations of preclinical discovery and development, and in evaluating pharmaceutical assets.  He serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of several biotechnology companies, government agencies and philanthropies.  He is also Chairman of Board of Directors for ABAC Therapeutics, an antibacterials development company in Barcelona.

Pompliano has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in the areas of infectious diseases and cancer drug discovery and mechanistic enzymology, and has presented over 50 invited lectures internationally. 

Pompliano played drums for Dr Quantum and the Operators, a group of Stanford chemistry graduate students who rocked with no uncertainty.