Dr. Ying Tam
Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Ying K. Tam, Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Acuitas Therapeutics, is a globally recognized expert in nanotechnology and immunology.
He earned an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Developmental and Molecular Biology from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, ON, prior to his post-doctoral fellowship in cancer immunotherapy at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver, BC.
Subsequent to that, Ying has held several academic positions, including Instructor and Assistant Professor in the Department of Hematology/Oncology at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, IL, overseeing the translational stem cell transplant immunotherapy research program. He also served as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of British Columbia.
Prior to Acuitas, Ying led a program developing a lipid nanoparticle (LNP), nucleic acid-based immunostimulatory drug at Tekmira Pharmaceuticals. He is a founding scientist at Acuitas and has helped the company become a global leader in the application of LNP technology for the delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics. This includes the development of the LNP carriers used in ONPATTRO® and, as Acuitas’ CSO, COMIRNATY® – the COVID-19 vaccine produced through a partnership between Acuitas, BioNTech and Pfizer.
Ying oversees the scientific program at Acuitas and guides both internal research programs and external programs with partners and collaborators. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, including many in high-impact journals such as Science, Nature and Nature Biotechnology and Cell.