Hok Hei Tam, Ph.D., co-founder and chief technology officer at Montai Therapeutics and senior principal at Flagship Pioneering, has combined his expertise in chemical engineering, informatics and machine learning to become a leading innovator in biotechnology. He has co-founded or contributed to the formation of five biotech companies, has created groundbreaking platforms and is a named inventor on 97 patents across 20 families.
At Montai, Tam invented and guided the development of the CONECTA platform, an artificial intelligence/machine learning–enabled system that integrates biology, chemistry and computation to discover new small molecule medicines. This platform harnesses nature’s bioactive chemistry to target historically hard-to-drug proteins and has already produced promising candidates for chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. By prioritizing scalability and predictive power in early discovery, CONECTA enables exploration of nature’s bioactive chemistry to improve efficiency and success rates. With Tam’s leadership, Montai has teamed up with NVIDIA to supercharge chemical machine learning and has an active discovery partnership with Pfizer to find new therapeutics with the CONECTA platform.
Tam also plays a critical role in Flagship Pioneering’s venture creation engine, where he and his colleagues translate novel scientific hypotheses into disruptive biotech companies. In addition to Montai, his efforts have helped launch enterprises such as Invaio Sciences, Terrana Biosciences and Sail Biomedicines, expanding Flagship’s impact across therapeutics, agriculture and sustainability.
Through these achievements, Tam has contributed to redefining the frontiers of innovation in life sciences, building platforms and companies that make transformative science accessible to people worldwide.