Frank Dyka, PhD

Frank Dyka received his Dr. rer. nat. (=PhD) in Biochemistry from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, where he focused on identifying novel genes involved in glaucoma. He then joined the lab of Dr. Robert Molday at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he obtained two Postdoctoral Fellowships from the Arthur and June Wills Foundation and the Foundation Fighting Blindness respectively. His work was focused on the molecular structure of Retinoschisin, the protein that is mutated in X-linked retinoschisis.

He then moved to the lab of Dr. William Hauswirth at the University of Florida, where his work focused on the development of gene therapies using adeno-associated virus (AAV) dual vectors and developing treatments for diseases caused by mutations in genes that exceed the size limits of a single AAV capsid. During his time in Florida, he developed AAV dual vector-based gene therapies to treat a variant of Usher Syndrome, the most common form of Stargardt disease, and in collaboration with researchers at the University of California San Francisco, a congenital form of deafness. Frank is an inventor on multiple patents on technologies resulting from his work.

After his postdoc, he joined the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 as a research assistant professor, where he will continue his research to improve recombinant AAV vectors and increase their utility for clinical and research applications. He has been awarded an exploratory research project grant from the Hillman Foundation to conduct this work.