Meet the Team

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. David is a Founder of Black Diamond Therapeutics and took the Company public on the NASDAQ 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, David 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. David 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. David’s R&D teams have progressed more than a dozen novel agents through clinical development in oncology, cardiovascular disease, and retinal degeneration.

David 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.

Dr. Lin has over 20 years of life sciences and technology industry experience. He spent significant time at Plexxikon, where most recently he served as Chief Operating Officer. He joined Plexxikon in 2005 and held positions of increasing responsibility in business development and operations management. Dr. Lin led much of the IND filing effort for vemurafenib/Zelboraf® and was a principal contributor to the drug’s early development. He was part of Plexxikon’s deal team responsible for three licensing deals valued collectively at over $2 billion. Prior to Plexxikon, Dr. Lin was an assistant to the CEO of Dendreon Corporation and served as a consultant to multiple pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies including Medtronic, Othera Pharmaceuticals and Acuity Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Lin was also formerly Vice President of Business Development for eTechtransfer, a biotechnology licensing and marketplace start-up that he co-founded. Previously, Dr. Lin was an operations engineer managing large scale manufacturing operations across multiple industries for BASF AG and Shell Oil Company. Dr. Lin received dual M.D. and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Wharton School of Business. Before graduate school, he earned a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where he graduated summa cum laude.