Li-Yao Huang is the Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder at FinalDose (YC P26), a pioneering oncology biotech developing programmable DNA drugs to destroy cancers and unlock previously undruggable disease targets.

Li-Yao earned a DPhil in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford and spent 5 years as a postdoctoral researcher at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, where he studied BRCA1-deficient cancers and PARP inhibitor resistance mechanisms.

Li-Yao developed a comprehensive discovery-to-validation framework using Cas9 and its derivatives to identify and verify novel therapeutic targets from high-throughput genetic and drug interaction data.

At Oxford, he led CRISPR screening projects that uncovered new druggable cancer targets and built pipelines that reduced hit validation time from months to just 7 days, demonstrating exceptional scientific rigor and translational impact.

FinalDose, backed by Y Combinator, is tackling the 85% of disease drivers that lack a druggable protein by targeting disease at the DNA level, representing a paradigm shift in how cancer therapies are discovered and developed.