Dr. Michelle Xia has over 20 years of experience in biopharmaceutical R&D and academic research.  Prior to founding Akeso Biopharma, she was Senior Vice President at Crown Bioscience, in charge of the Biologics Business Unit and Pfizer-Crown Asian Cancer Research Center.  Prior to that Dr. Xia worked at PDL BioPharma (later acquired by AbbVie), one of the pioneer therapeutic antibody technology and drug development company in the San Francisco Bay Area.  At PDL, Dr. Xia served as a CMC core member overseeing drug product process development / manufacturing, and FDA registration / IND enabling process.  Prior to that Dr. Xia worked in the CMC Process Development Department of Bayer in Berkeley.  Her responsibilities included building the Pathogen Safety facility at Bayer and managing viral safety evaluation / process validation for manufacturing of Bayer biologics products.  Dr. Xia began her pharmaceutical industrial career at AXY Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Celera Genomics in 2001.  During the six years-service with AXY/Celera, she took on both scientific and managerial roles in drug discovery programs from target validation through IND enabling activities.  Dr. Xia received her B.S. degree in Biochemistry from Sun Yat-Sen University in China and earned her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Microbiology from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K.  She did her postdoctoral research at University of Glasgow in the U.K. and cancer immune therapy research at University of Louisville Medical School in the U.S.  Founded in 2012, Akeso Biopharma aims to make therapeutic antibody drugs accessible and affordable to all patients through R&D and manufacturing innovation.  In 2015, Akeso signed a US$200 million agreement with Merck (MDS) by out-licensing a checkpoint clinical drug candidate to Merck.  Eight drug candidates developed by Akeso are currently in clinical stage.