Tadataka "Tachi" Yamada, MD, KBE, is a Venture Partner with Frazier Healthcare Partners.
Early life and education
Yamada was born in Tokyo, a grandson of one of the first people of Japanese descent to be fully trained as an American physician, and completed his education in the United States. After attending Phillips Academy for his high school education, he graduated from Stanford University with a BA in history and obtained his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine. He completed his internal medicine training at the Medical College of Virginia, and then became an investigator in the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases holding the rank of Major, U.S. Army Medical Corps. Subsequently, he trained in gastroenterology at the UCLA School of Medicine and assumed his first faculty position there. He later moved to the University of Michigan where he headed the Gastroenterology Division and ultimately became Chairman, Department of Internal Medicine and Physician-in-Chief of the University of Michigan Medical Center before joining GlaxoSmithKline. A scientist and scholar in gastroenterology, Yamada is the author of more than 150 original manuscripts on the subject and was the editor of The Textbook of Gastroenterology for its first five editions. The studies undertaken by Yamada and his collaborators led to basic discoveries in the post-translational processing and biological activation of peptide hormones, the structure and function of receptors for hormones regulating gastric acid secretion, and the regulation of genes involved in the acid secretory process. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Michigan, University of East Anglia, the University of Warwick, Washington College, and Loyola University of Chicago.
Career
Prior to Frazier Healthcare Partners, Yamada was Executive Vice-President and a Board Member of Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and served as the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of the company. Before joining Takeda, Yamada was the President of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In this capacity he oversaw grants totaling over $9 billion in programs directed at applying technologies to address major health challenges of the developing world including TB, HIV, malaria and other infectious diseases, malnutrition and maternal and child health. Yamada served as Chairman of Research and Development and was a member of the Board of Directors at GlaxoSmithKline before joining the foundation. In recognition of his contributions to medicine and science he has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Medicine and to Fellowship in the Academy of Medical Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many other activities he has been a member of the Board of Directors of public corporations across four continents and is currently a member of the Board of Agilent Technologies and chairs the Boards of Phathom Pharmaceuticals and Passage Bio, two companies for which he was a founder. He has also served as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Vice-Chair of the Council of the National Academy of Medicine, President of the Association of American Physicians and President of the American Gastroenterological Association. He currently serves as a member of the Board of the University of Michigan Health System and as Chairman of the Board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
