Moving the Needle

Accounting seems an unlikely path to take on the journey to find a cure for cancer, but that’s the road taken by David Poston ’85.

Poston started his career in public accounting working for a variety of companies but entered the biotech industry in a finance position in the late 1990s. He quickly discovered biotech was a “fit” for him because of the strategizing it required: allocating resources so that most went to drug development rather than administration. “You try to keep the science,” Poston says. “That’s how you survive.”

At Targeted Genetics, now AmpliPhi Biosciences, Poston became chief finance officer before moving on to serve as chief operating officer and chief finance officer at the Allen Institute for five years. “The thing that attracted me, that ultimately inspired me, is the thrill of the chase,” says Poston. “It was fun to grow the institute and work with [Microsoft co-founder] Paul Allen’s amazing team, but it wasn’t the thrill of the chase to make a business grow.”

Now Poston is the chief operating officer at EpiThany, a company that aims to commercialize cancer vaccines developed by the University of Washington. “I work with a collection of motivated folks trying to innovate, to develop drugs to meet a direct need,” Poston says. “We are trying to make it so our relatives can live longer and make it so there is less pain in this world.” One drug under development may be approved for treating patients in the next few years. That’s the sort of chase that gives Poston a thrill. “I feel I can help move the needle a little bit,” he says. “I’d like to do that before I hang up the tools.”