Dr. Dengfeng Dou earned his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from Wichita State University, USA, in 2010 and then completed a two-year postdoctoral training at the Mayo Clinic, where he focused on the discovery and structural optimization of enzyme inhibitors for oncology, antiviral therapy, COPD and other diseases and published 20 academic papers. After joining HitGen, he has filed approximately 82 patents (43 granted) and published 7 high-quality research articles. With seven years of professional experience in peptide drug discovery and GMP manufacturing, he has developed representative peptide products including Thymosin α1 and Thymopentin.

Since joining HitGen in August 2012, Dr. Dou has been in charge of the company’s core R&D businesses and platforms, covering medicinal chemistry, project pipeline management, DNA-Encoded Library (DEL) screening, and targeted protein degradation (TPD). He led the establishment and operation of the DEL screening platform, providing professional compound discovery services for hundreds of pharmaceutical enterprises, biotechnology companies and scientific research institutions worldwide, and facilitating downstream translational collaborations. He also built a distinctive targeted protein degradation platform to support internal research and cooperative projects for the discovery and functional research of novel E3 ligands.

Currently serving as Vice President of Strategy and Planning at HitGen, Dr. Dou leads and participates in the long-term planning of technological platforms, in-house R&D pipelines and industry-university-research ecological construction. He promotes the collaboration of multiple technological platforms and the application of artificial intelligence in early drug discovery, continuously iterates the original innovation system, and drives the leapfrog development of HitGen.