Dr. Guo-Liang Yu is the Executive Chairman of Crown Bioscience Inc., a publically-listed personalized oncology platform company with ~600 employees globally. He co-founded Epitomics Inc., an antibody biotechnology company, and served as Chairman, President and CEO for 10 years prior to its acquisition by Abcam for $170 million.

Dr. Yu’s success is driven by his scientific curiosity and passion for translating scientific discovery to real products. After graduating from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, he came to the United States in 1984 to pursue advanced studies. He obtained his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where he and Dr. Greider discovered telomerase and its mechanism in Dr. Blackburn’s lab. Drs. Blackburn and Greider received Nobel Prize in 2009 for their discovery.

Dr. Yu later joined Dr. Frederick Ausubel’s lab at Harvard University to pursue the question of how plants defend themselves against pathogens without an immune system, and was the first person in the world to identify a plant disease resistance gene. In 1993, when genomics was still in its infancy, Dr. Yu joined Human Genome Sciences Inc. as one of the first few senior scientists, identifying human gene targets for drug discovery. Among several important drug targets he studied was BLys, the first successfully genomic target for the development of a lupus antibody drug Benlysta, which was approved by FDA in 2010.

In 1998, Dr. Yu was attracted to identifying plant genes with economic value in agriculture and in bio-energy. He was Senior Vice President of R&D at Mendel Biotechnology Inc. where his team analyzed the function of a complete set of plant transcription factors, and ultimately identified several valuable traits such as enhanced crop yield, disease resistance, and drought tolerance. Dr. Yu has co-authored 43 peer-reviewed scientific articles that have been referenced by the scientific community over 6000 times. He is a co-inventor of more than 429 patents.

Dr. Yu is the founding president of the Chinese Biopharmaceutical Association (CBA) and serves on the boards of several professional organizations in the United States and China, including BayHelix, Chinese-American Bio/Pharmaceutical Society (CABS), National Foundation of Cancer Research, Ray Wu Memorial Foundation, University of Pacific. Dr. Yu is generous in coaching young entrepreneurs, and he has co-found a dozen startup companies in biotech and the healthcare sector, including Immune-Onc Therapeutics, Inc. in Palo Alto. He is also a venture partner at OrbiMed Venture LLC.