Dan Kemp

Dr. Kemp has over two decades of pharma R&D experience at Novartis, Merck and most recently Takeda, leading multiple drug discovery programs and establishing a track record in business development comprising an array of buy- and sell-side transactions, including NewCo creations and M&A deals.

During his tenure at Takeda, Dr. Kemp was a formative member of the company’s oncology cell therapy leadership team where he transacted a series of cornerstone collaborations that established a pipeline of CAR-NK, CAR-T and ɣδT cell programs. Notably, Dan spearheaded the in-licensing of Takeda’s flagship allogeneic NK cell program from MD Anderson Cancer Center in late 2019, which consolidated the emergence of NK cell therapies as an important therapeutic platform in the immuno-oncology space. He served on the Boards of GammaDelta Therapeutics and Adaptate Biotherapeutics, both companies that he was instrumental in creating in 2017 and 2019, respectively.  Previously, Dr. Kemp was Senior Vice President at Beryllium (acquired by UCB) where he was responsible for directing drug discovery partnerships, and prior to that he directed drug discovery programs at Merck Research Labs ranging from target validation to clinical proof of concept.  At Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, he led an early discovery team in diabetes and metabolic diseases.

Dr. Kemp received his BSc and PhD in molecular pharmacology from the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.  He was awarded an HHMI Fellowship at Harvard Medical School and carried out his postdoc research on pancreatic beta cell biology at Massachusetts General Hospital.