Dr. Yong Dai is a Founder of Frontera Therapeutics. Dr. Dai is a proven leader in biologics and gene therapy drug development. Before joining Frontera, Dr. Dai most recently served as the Chief Technology Officer at Prevail Therapeutics, a gene therapy company, where he built and led a CMC organization to develop and advance multiple AAV gene therapy drugs including the Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders to clinical trials. As part of the founding executive team, he helped the company to rapidly achieve its IPO on the NASDAQ in 2019 and the acquisition by Eli Lilly in 2020. Prior to Prevail, Dr. Dai worked at uniQure, a gene therapy company, where he led the CMC development of all the pipeline programs including a late clinical stage gene therapy drug for Hemophilia B, and a commercial stage drug, Glybera®, the world’s first commercial approved AAV gene therapy drug. Prior to his time at uniQure, he served as the Head of Process Development Commercial Support at Shire Pharmaceuticals and was responsible for the CMC technical support of all Shire’s commercial biologics drugs for rare diseases, including Elaprase®, Replagal® and Vpriv®. Prior to his tenure at Shire, Dr. Dai served as the Head of Process Development at ImmunoGen, Inc., an antibody drug conjugates (ADC) drug development company, where he led the process development of multiple ADC drugs, including Kadcyla® (T-DM1) from its research and clinical stages to the commercial stage, as the first ADC in the world to hit blockbuster status with annual sales surpassed $1B.

Dr. Dai received a B.S. in Biochemistry and an M.S. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Peking University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Chinese Academy of Sciences. He completed his postdoctoral research at Harvard University.