Yung-Hsiang Kao
Principal Scientist, Process Development
"By focusing most heavily on proteins that respond to biological stimuli, transmit essential signals, or convert signals into function, we believe there is an opportunity to discover novel biology and impact the lives or patients with debilitating diseases."
I joined Genentech in 1995. as a post-doctoral fellow to study glycosylated protein and peptide using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. I also began to work on NMR applications for supporting biopharmaceutical product development.
After completing my post-doctoral research, I took a Scientist position at Genentech. My group, currently including an NMR lab and a protein characterization lab, provides analytical supports for product characterization, assay development and validation, process development, process validation, and production troubleshooting.
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My lab is within Protein Analytical Chemistry, part of US Biologics Technical Development. The main focus of my lab is to provide analytical support for product characterization. Understanding structure-function relationship in our molecules is the main focus of my lab. Antibodies and other protein based biopharmaceutical products are heterogeneous because they typically contain multiple post-translational modifications.
Our job is to determine what modifications exist in our products and what impact these modifications have on the products. We use multiple analytical tools, including chromatography, electrophoresis, and mass spectrometry, to help us identify product variants due to different modifications. Once product variants are identified, we often need to enrich these minor species present in the product for further characterization and determine their biological activities.
- Penn State University, Ph.D. – 1994
- Tsing Hua University, B.S. – 1986