Akiko Yanagiya

Team Leader at ARCALIS

Speaker

Dr. Akiko Yanagiya currently serves as a team leader in business development at ARCALIS, Inc., in which she is in charge of designing mRNA and saRNA by optimizing nucleotide sequences at the CDS and 5’/3’ UTRs for efficient target protein expression. She earned a Ph.D. of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo, in which she was engaged in studies about pathogenesis and vaccine applications of RNA viruses such as poliovirus and hepatitis C viruses. She previously served as a scientist in the department of Biochemistry at McGill University from 2003 to 2017, in which she had published a number of peer reviewed publications about mRNA translation initiation and physiological consequences of mRNA translational control in eukaryotes. Her expertise covers a wide range of RNA biology such as mRNA vaccine and RNA editing as well as mRNA/saRNA manufacturing and quality controls. She is passionate about her work to improve mRNA therapeutics, which must be a potential modality to cure a variety of diseases such as viral infection and cancer by adopting innovative RNA technologies.