Member Since 2022
David M. Epstein, PhD
Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
David M. Epstein, Ph.D., is a biopharmaceutical leader and executive who has successfully led R&D teams in academic, start-up, mid-size, and global large-pharmaceutical settings for over 20 years. Epstein is a Founder of Black Diamond Therapeutics and took the Company public on the NASDQ Global Market in January 2020, having cumulatively raised over $400 million in private and public financing.
Prior to his appointment as Black Diamond’s President and CEO, Epstein was Vice Dean, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, establishing the Centre for Technology & Development and building a pipeline of venture-backed companies. Epstein was Associate Professor in the Cancer & Stem Cell Biology Program at Duke-NUS where he established a research program focused on the role of defective mRNA splicing in cancer. This work resulted in the simultaneous discovery of splicing-derived shared tumor antigens and their cognate TCR pairs, which has led to the founding of PairX Bio, a venture-backed Precision Immuno-Oncology company. Previously, he was Chief Scientific Officer at OSI Pharmaceuticals, acquired by Astellas Pharma for over $4 billion in 2010, and was a founder and senior executive at Archemix Corp. Epstein’s R&D teams have progressed more than a dozen novel agents through clinical development in oncology, cardiovascular disease, and retinal degeneration.
Epstein earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Brandeis University and led a joint post-doctoral fellowship in protein structure-function and NMR dynamics between the labs of Steven Benkovic (Penn State) and Peter Wright at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He received a B.Sc. in Chemistry from Lewis & Clark College.
Black Diamond Therapeutics
Black Diamond Therapeutics is a precision oncology medicine company pioneering the development of novel MasterKey therapies. Black Diamond is addressing the significant unmet need for novel precision oncology therapies for patients with genetically defined cancers who have limited treatment options. Black Diamond is built upon a deep understanding of cancer genetics, onco-protein function, and drug discovery. The Company’s proprietary Mutation-Allostery-Pharmacology, or MAP drug discovery engine, is designed to allow Black Diamond to analyze population-level genetic sequencing tumor data to predict and validate oncogenic mutations that promote cancer across tumor types as MasterKey mutations. Black Diamond discovers and develops selective MasterKey therapies against these families of oncogenic mutations. Black Diamond was founded by David M. Epstein, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Buck, Ph.D. For more information, please visit www.blackdiamondtherapeutics.com.
