Charlene Liao, PhD
Founder, CEO and Chair of the Board
Charlene Liao, Ph.D., co-founded Immune-Onc Therapeutics and has served as our President and Chief Executive Officer and as a member of our board of directors since May 2016. Charlene has 25 years of industry experience in drug development and business leadership. From 2002-2016, Charlene held global drug development roles at Genentech where she was instrumental in leading development efforts across the product lifecycle for ten new molecular entities (NMEs) in a variety of therapeutic areas including: hematology-oncology, oncology, immunology, infectious diseases, and metabolic disorders. Prior to joining Genentech, Charlene was a Director of Business Development at Rigel. She began her career in biotech as a scientist at Tularik, before its acquisition by Amgen.
Charlene holds a B.S. in Biochemistry from Peking University in China, and received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in the laboratory of famed biologist Dr. Michael Rosbash, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Charlene completed her postdoctoral research in immunology at UCSF where she was a Fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fund in the laboratory of Dr. Dan Littman and a Special Fellow of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) in the laboratory of Dr. Art Weiss.