Samantha Liang, PhD

Samantha Liang, PhD, is the Alliance and Collaboration Lead at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI). She builds and manages diverse partnerships with companies, nonprofits and academic researchers in support of PICI’s committed collaborative approach to cancer research.

Among her current responsibilities, Samantha works on PICI’s strategic alliance with Resilience, which aims to accelerate cell and gene therapy development through investments, manufacturing partnerships and technology innovation. Additionally, she is the scientific lead for PICI’s RADIOHEAD program, which seeks to identify novel mechanisms of immunotherapy response and resistance from a cohort of 1,000+ patients receiving checkpoint inhibitors as standard-of-care. She identifies and partners with biotech, pharma and academic labs to generate molecular data on RADIOHEAD’s 3,400+ longitudinal blood samples, with the goal of creating a rich multi-omic dataset for integrated analyses.

Prior to PICI, Samantha was a senior scientist at Abbvie for five years, where she was a Discovery Lead for pre-clinical and clinical programs in immuno-oncology. Experienced with the drug development process, she has supported projects from early discovery, to IND, and through Phase I clinical trials. Before Abbvie, she received her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from UC San Francisco and a BS in bioengineering from UC Berkeley. Her diverse research experiences spanning the fields of synthetic biology, chemical biology, antibody engineering, antibody-drug conjugate development, cancer biology and immuno-oncology have given her a broad scientific foundation from which to ideate and evaluate potential partnerships, as well as collaborate and communicate effectively with existing partners.