Dr. Weiliang Xu, PhD

Associate Director of Business Development at PepLib

Speaker

I am the Associate Director of Business Development at PepLib. Before joining PepLib, I was a senior scientist at a stealth-mode biotech startup in Boston and at SRI International, where I specialized in developing tissue- and cell-specific peptides for intracellular drug delivery. I earned my Ph.D. in Chemistry from the National University of Singapore and completed postdoctoral training in peptide chemistry under Professor Lei Liu at Tsinghua University. During this time, I achieved the synthesis of the world’s first mirror-image DNA polymerase, published in Nature Chemistry in 2016, and the largest synthetic protein, published in Cell Discovery in 2017. Following this, I joined Novo Nordisk, where I applied protein total chemical synthesis to study the structure of the human glucagon receptor. I further trained in mirror-image phage display with Professor Michael Kay at the University of Utah, focusing on developing mirror-image peptide inhibitors targeting immune checkpoints.