David L. Lucchino has been a leader in the life sciences for more than two decades, as an executive, an entrepreneur, an investor and a policy and economic development leader. Most recently, he was the President and CEO of Frequency Therapeutics, Inc., a company he co-founded in 2014. Frequency was as a regenerative medicine company, born out of the labs of the renown MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer, and focused on developing therapeutics to activate a person’s innate potential to restore function within the body. The Company’s pipeline included programs for sensorineural hearing loss and remyelination in Multiple Sclerosis.
David brought Frequency public in 2019, having secured three rounds of institutional funding, including a crossover round with Deerfield Management, Perceptive Advisors, RTW Investments. Frequency’s $89M initial public offering was co-led by Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. In total, he raised over $275M in equity financing. In addition, he helped secure a global joint-development and commercialization partnership with Astellas Pharma, in a deal valued at $625M for the company’s lead asset for hearing, which included an $80M upfront payment.
Frequency reached a $1.9B valuation on the NASDAQ with a 13X cash-on-cash return achieved during the first 18 months following the IPO. The company completed an M&A with Korro Bio (Nasdaq: KRRO) and David sits on its board of directors.
Prior to Frequency, David co-founded Semprus BioSciences (also with Dr. Langer) in 2005. As CEO, he led the $27M financing, strategy and FDA approval and European CE marketing clearance of a product to reduce blood clotting on medical devices. Semprus was acquired by Teleflex (NYSE: TFX) in 2012 for up to $80M, marking a successful exit for the Company and its investors 5AM Ventures, Pangaea Ventures and SR One.
Previously, David worked at the Boston-based venture capital firm Polaris Partners, where he focused on healthcare investing and recruiting board members to portfolio companies. He began in the life sciences as a co-founder at LaunchCyte, a biotechnology investment entity with the University of Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. LaunchCyte raised $13M, founded numerous companies and delivered a successful outcome to investors achieving a cash-on-cash return of 3x. These include a portfolio firm that partnered with Biogen on the development of a clinical stage candidate for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) a contract research organization and Reaction Biology, that was sold to a private equity firm. David is the past Chairman of MassBio, a 1500-member biotechnology trade association based in Cambridge, MA. He was appointed by former Governor Charlie Baker to the Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council and is a member of the College of Fellows for the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. David serves on the boards of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation and the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and was part of a NOLS expedition that summited Denali. He served on the Mt. Auburn Hospital Board of Trustees, a Harvard Medical School teaching institution, from 2007 to 2021, where he was Chairman of the Audit Committee. David earned a B.A. from Denison University, an M.S. from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.