Hong Liang, Ph.D.

Hong Liang is our Senior Vice President of Discovery Medicine and has served in this position since December of 2015. Dr. Liang leads Kodiak’s discovery efforts with the goal to design important medicines that prevent and/or slow the progression of retinal disease in high risk patients. Most recently, Dr. Liang was Senior Director at the Rinat Laboratory of Pfizer Inc. where she led the Genomics and Computational Biology group focusing on target discovery and translational biomarker work. Previously, she was responsible for many preclinical projects in metabolic and neurological diseases at Rinat/Pfizer. In particular, Dr. Liang was the project initiator and inventor and a driving force behind Rinat/Pfizer’s Proprotein Convertase Subtilisin Kexin type 9 inhibitor (PCSK9i) bococizumab development program. Bococizumab antagonizes PCSK9-mediated degradation of low density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor, increases LDL-C clearance, and lowers blood LDL-C levels. Bococizumab’s phase 3 global clinical development program involves approximately 32,000 high-risk primary and secondary prevention patients and is being studied for its potential to lower the known cardiac risk factor LDL-C and improve cardiovascular outcomes. Earlier, Dr. Liang lead the expression profiling and knockout construct generation efforts at Deltagen Inc. Dr. Liang trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, earned a Ph.D. degree at Northwestern University, and completed requirements in Biology at the University of Science and Technology of China.