Yijie Gao

China Innovation Center of Roche (Shanghai, China)                                      i) Build Capabilities for Therapeutic Antibody Discovery: -A high-capacity microfluidics-based single B cell platform for hits discovery from immunized murine or rabbit repertoires. -Synthetic phage library with minimal developability liabilities. ii) Build Capabilities in Antibody Optimization: -Implement an optimization workflow covering humanization, affinity and developability optimization, and immunogenicity liability removal. -Drive collaborative efforts to incorporate AI/ML across all discovery and optimization workflows. iii) Strategic Pipeline Development: -Co-build the biotherapeutic pipeline by collaborating with disease areas that align with global Roche strategy. iv) Team Development and Growth: -Mentor and develop team members, supporting their skill and career advancement.

Leading biotherapeutic project teams in antibody discovery process via a disciplined procedure, integrating efforts of functional groups to ensure delivery of therapeutic leads in required timeline. Appropriate strategic design and execution enabled accelerated progression of multiple projects. Engineering of leads for desired activity profiles and biophysical properties, including ortholog and species specificity/crossreactivity, affinity adjustment, humanization, bi-/multi-functional antibody design and optimization, developability optimization/liability removal. Efficient and innovative engineering efforts have allowed many projects to progress to stage gates on accelerated timelines, including projects successfully into candidate nomination stage and further into Phase I. Representing biotherapeutic discovery function in the interaction with therapeutic areas in the process of target validation and discovery strategic designing. Solid understanding of target biology and therapeutic development experience has successfully enabled successful strategic design of projects planning at initiation. IND filing of final leads for phase I clinical study. Mentoring and training new project leaders to grow into effective and successful team leader roles. Mentored a postdoctoral fellow in the exploration of ex vivo hypermutation system in mammalian cells. Work terminated after 1yr due to organizational change. Work resulted in multiple patents and publications and book chapter

Successfully initiated technology development to overexpress difficult to expression protein at high yields. Studied and Applied Unfolded Protein Response mechanisms to substantially boost the yields of many hard to expression proteins by 2-20 folds. Led a patent application which then was granted. Mechanistic study of signaling pathway of BMP/GDF/TGF family cytokines via proteomic approach. Work resulted in 1 publication and 1 invited plenary talk at the 7th International Conference on Bone Morphogenic Proteins. Mentoring postdoctoral fellow whose work resulted in a publication in GDF8 signaling mechanism.

Mechanisms of progenitor T and B cell development and V(D)J recombination, impact of DNA repair defects on lymphogenesis and neurogenesis, and the mechanism of tumorigenesis due to genome instability. This series of work resulted in multiple high impact publications including Cell, Nature, Molecular Cell.