David Pompliano

David L. Pompliano is a drug discovery scientist, entrepreneur and executive with roughly 30 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry. He earned a BS in Chemistry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Chemistry from Stanford University, then completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship in enzymology and molecular biology at Harvard University in the laboratory of Jeremy Knowles. Over his career he has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in infectious disease, cancer drug discovery, and mechanistic enzymology and delivered more than 50 invited international lectures.

Before founding companies, Pompliano held senior R&D leadership roles at large pharma, serving as Worldwide Basic Research Head of Infectious Diseases at Merck and Vice President of Biology at GlaxoSmithKline. In those roles he led drug discovery teams that generated pre-clinical credentials for more than 30 development candidates and contributed to five approved drugs — Recarbrio, Altabax, Tykerb, Votrient, and Promacta.

He subsequently became a serial biotech co-founder. He was President and CEO of BioLeap (a computational drug-design company) from roughly 2009–2012, co-founded and served as Chief Scientific Officer of Revolution Medicines (now Nasdaq: RVMD, a Third Rock company) and Lodo Therapeutics, and co-founded and led Daros. Across these ventures he has raised over $70 million in Series A financing. Today he is Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Odyssey Therapeutics, an Operating Partner at Accelerator Life Science Partners, and Principal/Owner of Sanderling Consulting LLC, through which he provides strategy and asset-evaluation services and serves on multiple boards and scientific advisory boards, including as an advisor to Trobix Bio.

• Invests and advises almost exclusively in life sciences / therapeutics, reflecting three decades in drug discovery — oncology, inflammation, and infectious disease.
• Backs and helps build companies at the seed / earliest stage, often as a scientific co-founder rather than a passive check-writer (BioLeap, Revolution Medicines, Lodo Therapeutics, Daros, Odyssey).
• Emphasis on novel drug-discovery platforms and rigorous target/mechanism validation — his own work centers on mechanistic enzymology and computational drug design.
• As an operator-angel and Operating Partner at Accelerator LSP, he brings hands-on company-building, CSO-level scientific diligence, and fundraising track record (>$70M in Series A capital raised across ventures).