YU Guo-Liang 余國良

余國良博士

  • Chairman & CEO, Apollomics Inc.

Dr. Guo-Liang Yu is the Chairman and CEO of Apollomics Inc., an innovative therapeutics company devoted to curing cancer by combining immunology and other caner fighting methods. Before Apollomics, Dr. Yu was the Executive Chairman of Crown Biosicence Inc., a publically-listed personalized oncology platform company with ~600 employees globally.  Crown Bioscience was recently acquired by JSR for $400 million. He co-founded Epitomics Inc., an antibody biotechnology company, and served as Chairman and CEO for 10 years prior to its acquisition by Abcam for $170 million. During his tenure at Epitomics, spun-off Apexigen Inc., an immune-oncology therapeutics company. He was also a venture partner at OrbiMed Venture LLC during 2013-2019.

余博士的成功源於他的科學好奇心和將科學發現轉化為實際產品的熱情。 從中國上海的複旦大學畢業後,他於1984年來到美國繼續深造。 獲得了加州大學伯克利分校博士學位。在那裡他和 Greider 博士在 Blackburn 博士的實驗室發現了端粒酶及其機制。 Blackburn 和 Greider博士 因他們的發現獲得了 2009 年的諾貝爾獎。

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 identified the 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 44 peer-reviewed scientific articles that have been referenced by the scientific community over 10,000 times. He is a co-inventor of more than 400 patents.

Dr. Yu currently the Chairman of Bayhelix, a leadership organization in biotech industry. Dr. Yu was 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 Chinese-American Bio/Pharmaceutical Society (CABS), National Foundation of Cancer Research, Ray Wu Memorial Foundation, and University of Pacific.  Dr. Yu is generous in coaching young entrepreneurs, and he has co-founded a dozen startup companies in biotech and the healthcare sector, including Immune-Onc Therapeutics, Inc.in Palo Alto.