David Pirman
Senior Vice President & Head of Discovery Biohaven
David has over 10 years experience in drug discovery primarily focused on understanding fundamental metabolism applied to oncology, immunology and genetically defined diseases. Previously, he lead the metabolism and proteomics department at Agios Pharmaceuticals. He spent over eight years starting as bench level scientist working and leading projects across the portfolio and indication space. The team he led supported all aspects of a project’s life cycle from developing a fundamental understanding of target biology to leading translational approaches to better understand clinical observations. He and his team’s efforts have led to over 20+ publications and numerous successful academic collaborations at Agios and contributed to the successful development of IDH inhibitors and PK activators. His main interests lie at the intersection of technology and biology particularly applied to drug discovery. He recently joined Biohaven to lead the development of our discovery labs in Cambridge, MA.
David earned is PhD at the University of Florida under Rick Yost and completed his postdoc at Pfizer in Groton, CT where he built metabolism platforms to better understand the impacts of pharmacological regulation of enzymes in metabolic disease indications.
Seminars
This workshop will critically evaluate the translational limitations of in vitro and in vivo models in MG, CIDP, GBS and MMN. While MG may be comparatively easier to model, CIDP and GBS rely on complicated induction systems that do not reliably reflect human immunologic origin, heterogeneity or anatomical distribution. By directly interrogating how current models oversimplify antibody-driven pathology, fail to capture unknown autoantibody subsets (particularly in CIDP/MMN), and may not represent disease compartments such as spinal involvement, developers can recalibrate go/no-go decisions earlier in the pipeline. Attendees will redefine what constitutes meaningful translational evidence, ensuring that preclinical immune modulation signals correlate with functional muscle improvement and clinically relevant biomarkers before advancing assets into heterogeneous patient populations.
Key Questions to be Addressed:
- Analyzing how current in vivo induction methods fail to accurately reflect human disease mechanisms, particularly in CIDP and GBS
- Comparing situations in which developers bypass animal models entirely and evaluating when that strategy is justified
- Embedding clinically relevant biomarkers into preclinical assays to improve forward and reverse translation
- Defining what constitutes a translatable efficacy signal rather than an isolated model-specific response
- Preventing the premature elimination of candidates due to poor model representativeness rather than flawed human biology
