Don Dai, MD, PhD, MS
Co-Founder & CSO
Don has many years of experience as a gynecologist, cancer biologist, translational cancer researcher and bioinformatician. He obtained his MD from Shanghai Medical University and worked as a gynecologist in Peking Union Medical College Hospital for 6 years treating patients with various types of gynecologic cancers. He then moved to the U.S., where he completed a PhD in reproductive endocrinology and has over 17 years of experience in cancer biology and translational cancer research.
As a faculty member at the University of Iowa, his main research focuses include understanding the molecular mechanisms for tumor progression and drug resistance, and development of genetic biomarkers for predicting clinical outcomes. Don was awarded an American Cancer Society Scholar Grant for developing novel cocktail regimens for aggressive endometrial cancer. He has also been funded by two pharmaceutical companies to conduct preclinical animal studies for cancer drug development.
More recently, Don developed a theoretical model to mathematically describe proliferation and differentiation of a normal tissue and the process of malignant transformation. He was awarded the Helen Johnson Scholarship from the Carver College of Medicine University of Iowa and received a Master of Science in Informatics in May of 2015. With this experience, Don is now leading a team of scientists at Immortagen for the development of a bioinformatics pipeline to predict gynecologic cancer outcomes and to identify driver mutations in a heterogeneous tumor using personalized approaches.