Charlene Liao, PhD
Founder, CEO and Chair of the Board
Charlene Liao, Ph.D., is a biotech Board Chair, CEO, and Founder whose career spans discovery science, global drug development and corporate governance. Charlene co-founded Immune-Onc Therapeutics in 2016. As Chair of the board of directors since 2022, Charlene has recruited the independent directors, established the Research and Development Committee, and formalized the Compensation Committee of the board of directors, making fiduciary decisions from the governance seat while remaining accountable to that same board as chief executive. She has navigated the board-management relationship from both sides at once and understands where those roles must be kept distinct.
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.