About

Dr. Hodges is a biotech founder and scientist with 30 years’ leadership across many muscular dystrophy and their therapeutic modalities. He was founder and CSO of Prothelia, securing $200M in grants, partnering & series A funding for a neuromuscular biologic therapy. Dr. Hodges was a discovery consultant at Third Rock Ventures and Partner at CureDuchenne Ventures, focused primarily on novel therapeutic approaches for muscular dystrophies. Dr. Hodges trained in cell and molecular biology with a focus on neuromuscular disorders, completed training in gene therapy at Duke University and Genzyme (Sanofi), has authored 30+ publications, and is active in the muscular dystrophy patient community.

Yunxiang joined MLAB  as a co-founder and CSO, responsible for defining MLAB’s pipeline and R&D strategy. He has over two decades of drug discovery with broad expertise in enzyme replacement therapy, drug delivery, bispecific antibody or bi-/multi-functional antibody fusion protein design, and AAV gene therapy development in various diseases areas ranging from lysosomal storage diseases, genetic metabolic and muscular dystrophies, autoimmune diseases, and immune-oncology. His longest career was at Genzyme/Sanofi where he was the head of muscle diseases and invented FDA/EMA approved drug Nexviazyme for the treatment of Pompe disease.

Prior to joining MLAB, Yunxiang served as the global head of CANbridge, responsible for strategic oversight of its gene therapy pipelines and external collaboration/partnership. Before CANbridge, Yunxiang was a SVP at Shenogen for biologics discovery and development.

Yunxiang earned his B.S. from Zhejiang University, M.S. from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PhD at Miller School of Medicine at University of Miami, and completed his post-doc training at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He has co-authored about 30 publications and is a key inventor of over 15 issued patents and 5 pending patent applications.

Yangde was MLAB’s first employee. As the CTO/COO, he oversees MLAB’s technology platforms and daily business operations. Additionally, he contributes to pipeline initiation/progression and strategy implementation by closely collaborating with the management team and other stakeholders.

Before joining MLAB, Yangde served as the VP of Antibody Engineering at KLUS Pharma, concentrating on developing novel immunotherapies for cancer treatment. Prior to that, he held the position of VP of Antibody Discovery at Abpro, a company specializing in the development of T cell redirecting bispecific antibodies for cancer treatment. Yangde spent the majority of his career at Sanofi for nearly 20 years, with increasing responsibilities. As a Director at Sanofi’s US Biologics Research, he and his team were responsible for discovering novel therapeutic antibodies across various therapeutic areas. They have delivered multiple candidates to the company’s pipeline.

Yangde received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, an M.S. from the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a B.S. from Huazhong Agricultural University.

Yanfeng has more than 16 years of experience in creating innovative protein engineering solutions and biologics drugs. He specializes in utilizing biochemistry, structural biology, and data science to design novel specificities and improve characteristics of biologics, including enzymes, fusion proteins, and antibodies. Prior to joining MLAB Biosciences, Yanfeng served as the Director of Protein Sciences and the first employee at Seismic Therapeutics to build the high throughput protein engineering and characterization function and support machine learning designs and immune diseases programs. Prior to that, Yanfeng was a lab head of structural biology and computation design at Large Molecule Research department at Sanofi US, where he integrated leading edge technologies of structural biology and computational modeling to support global projects spanning multiple therapeutic fields including rare diseases, oncology, and immune diseases.  

Yanfeng received his BA degree in biochemistry and PhD in structural biology at Beijing University, followed by a postdoc training in Tim Springer lab at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School.