Dr. Zhao joined Viva Biotech in 2024, primarily responsible for the CDMO business. Before joining the company, Dr. Zhao held senior management positions in several renowned domestic CRO companies since back to China in 2009. His work spanned nearly all CRO chemical business areas, from medicinal chemistry to process development to GMP production, giving him rich experience in team building and scientific management.
During his tenure at WuXi AppTec, he grew a team from 41 members to over 650 members across three teams within five years. As Vice President at Asymchem, he, as a patent inventor, led the entire R&D process from route design to process development to the GMP production of hundreds of kilograms of N2O-dideuteromethyl dextromethorphan. This process significantly reduced raw material costs by replacing two other expensive deuterated reagents in the original process with deuterated methyl as the sole deuterated reagent.
Before returning to China, he held positions at AMRI, working on process development and scale-up, and at Kalypsys, where as a founding employee, he participated in and led the medicinal chemistry/process development for a Phase II clinical project on PPAR agonists. Dr. Zhao graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in organic synthesis chemistry and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published 18 research papers in renowned scientific journals and is the inventor of 12 patents.
