Hok Hei Tam is Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Montai Therapeutics and a Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering. Dr. Tam has a distinctive mix of expertise in chemical and bioengineering, informatics, and machine learning that has shaped his early and rapid career successes. Today, at 34 years old, Dr. Tam has become a well-respected data scientist, serial inventor, and company builder whose innovations have turned into or contributed to the formation of five biotech companies and created technology solutions broadly affecting human health. At Montai Therapeutics, Dr. Tam leads technical discovery efforts integrating diverse experts across biology, chemistry and AI/ML to pursue the company’s mission to address pressing unmet needs in chronic disease by harnessing diverse bioactive chemistry from nature. In his capacity as Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering, he leads explorations to discover novel biological mechanisms and create new biotechnologies. With a team of entrepreneurial scientists, he champions scientific discovery, intellectual property, and business strategy that form the foundation of Flagship’s breakthrough startups. Dr. Tam received a Ph.D. from MIT in chemical engineering, where he worked on a wide range of projects in drug delivery, fibrosis prevention, and vaccines. His graduate research was supported by a competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and his efforts have been published in top journals including PNAS, Nature Materials, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Medicine. Dr. Tam also holds a B.Sc. in mathematics and a B.Sc. in chemical engineering from The Ohio State University.
As Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Montai Therapeutics, Hok Hei is responsible for integrating biology, chemistry and AI/ML disciplines to harness diverse bioactive chemistry from nature and design precision therapeutics that can address pressing unmet needs in chronic disease. Leveraging deep expertise in advanced computational sciences, Hok Hei’s team is working to predictably discover accessible, daily dose oral medicines for historically hard-to-drug targets, starting in inflammation and autoimmune disease. Specifically, Hok Hei invented the design and guided implementation of Montai’s CONECTA™ platform, which serves as a massive AI/ML-enabled assist engine for drug developers – enabling them to ask integrated questions for precise biological outcomes, to consider the broadest range of molecular modalities simultaneously, to prioritize across comprehensive druglike properties and to define lead optimization paths. Thanks to the efforts of Hok Hei and his team, Montai is rapidly advancing a platform that aims to transform the efficiency and odds of success in early small molecule drug discovery. In parallel, as a Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering, Hok Hei Tam works closely with a multidisciplinary team of entrepreneurial scientists to explore novel scientific principles, biological mechanisms and integrated technologies to support the creation of new biotechnology solutions to human health challenges. His efforts build not only disruptive new concepts in healthcare, but novel intellectual property and concepts for commercial models that inform the creation of new start-up entities across a variety of disciplines.