David Esposito: The Science of Conviction
When David Esposito describes leadership, he reaches for a battlefield metaphor. “The forward edge is a military term that describes where the fighting is intense and thickest. And that’s where biotech innovation is. There’s no place to hide. At some point the team needs direction and the leader has to make the decision.”
He speaks from decades of experience. Before leading ONL Therapeutics, a Michigan company developing therapies to protect vision, Esposito served as an infantry officer in combat with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. That formative period shaped how he later approached the uncertainty of biotech. His stellar record includes guiding Armune BioScience to a sale to Exact Sciences and helping drive Phadia to a $3.5 billion acquisition by Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Balancing Science and Shareholder Pressure
In biotech, every decision lives between data and deadlines. Discovery may begin in the lab, but survival often depends on what happens within the leadership team. “In healthcare or biotech innovation it all emerges and starts from science,” Esposito says. “If you’ve got a question, run another experiment to get further clarification. The challenge with that in the biotech world is you don’t have unlimited time and unlimited capital.”
That tension between scientific rigor and investor impatience never really disappears. “Investors want results quicker, sooner, faster,” he notes. “There’s a healthy tension between the people funding your progress, the desire to have the perfect solution for patients, and the need to make some progress.”
Knowing When to Move
Perfection, Esposito learned, can stall everything. At Armune BioScience, he led development of a diagnostic test that improved prostate-cancer screening accuracy. “It was a better predictor of your risk of prostate cancer than PSA,” he recalls. “But a diagnostic test is never 100 percent perfect. You would love to optimize the test further and further, but you never would have gotten into the market.”
Progress, he says, requires accepting imperfection. “You have to feel comfortable talking to a clinician where your test may, at some point, be wrong or give what’s called a false negative. The test is just one piece of the puzzle that helps a clinician make an informed decision on patient care”
The Market Reality
Across the industry, similar trade-offs define progress. After a sluggish 2023-24, global biotech funding began to rebound in mid-2025, with venture investment up roughly 70 percent quarter-on-quarter, according to GlobalData. Yet success rates for drug development remain near 10 percent, and a single therapy can still cost more than $2 billion to reach approval.
ONL’s focus on protecting retinal cells from dying rather than replacing them positions it apart from gene-therapy competitors such as Nanoscope and Ray Therapeutics. The company’s bet is that protecting retinal cells, not repair, could reach patients faster and scale more efficiently across degenerative eye diseases.
Conviction Before Proof
For Esposito, innovation begins with belief long before the data catches up. “You need to be approaching markets that have large unmet needs,” he says. “Investors often back team determination as much as data. Storytelling becomes not marketing, but a leadership discipline, the ability to communicate both vision and a sense of urgency.”
Conviction, he adds, must also be visible. “People like to know you have skin in the game. Investors can snuff out somebody’s weekend hobby from being something totally committed.”
Redefining Success and Ethics
Even when the odds are brutal, progress still matters. “The failure rate of drug therapy is like 95+ percent,” Esposito says. It is a disheartening statistic, but he refuses to see it as defeat. “For me, success is simply moving the science forward and the team learning on the journey.”
Keeping morale alive against those odds demands purpose. “People need to know they matter to the cause. Because if they can see they matter to that in the work, they also subconsciously feel they matter to their other parts of life.”
Ethical decisions, too, rarely come with clarity in early-stage biotech. “When it’s a team of five and you’re the leader, you bet your ass you’re going to have to make the call.”
Purpose as Operating Principle
That decisiveness traces back to Ranger School, where hierarchy gives way to merit. “When you show up, you take all your rank off,” Esposito says. “It’s a rankless leadership journey. You’ve got to show up without an ego, without hey, you’re the CEO or the VP of sales. You’re showing up to solve problems.”
The same principle guides his second venture, Harvest Time Partners, which applies character-development lessons to family and business leadership. “Serving a cause bigger than yourself,” he says, “that’s been hard-wired into me for a while. At some point you come to the realization that you’re a small part in a bigger plan.”
The Conviction to Decide
In a biotech landscape shaped by capital cycles, regulation, and rapid discovery, that balance between discipline and adaptability may be the edge that matters most.
“Be absolutely ruthless and stubborn in the approach to that long-term goal,” he says, “but very flexible in the steps along the way.”
This philosophy – formed in combat, refined in the lab, and tested in the boardroom – rests on a single enduring truth: conviction is the courage to act in the face of uncertainty.
