Dr. Peter (Peizhi) Luo, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Adagene, is an experienced entrepreneur passionate on devising a sustainable biotechnology business strategy by leveraging the industry’s most advanced technology and intellectual property for novel product development. He utilizes a multi-disciplinary approach to his work, combining methods from experimental and computational biology, chemistry, and physics.
Prior to this, Dr. Luo was the Chief Technology Officer of Abmaxis Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck & Co., and Director of Biologics Technology at Merck & Co., Inc. Before the acquisition of Abmaxis by Merck in 2006, Dr. Luo was the Cofounder, Chief Technology Officer, President and a Board Director of Abmaxis Inc. During Dr. Luo’s time at Merck, he designed and built the antibody libraries and engineering platforms that propelled the discovery of Merck’s novel biologics. He received two Merck Special Achievement Awards for his leadership and scientific contribution. Before his work at Abmaxis, Dr. Luo served as the first lead scientist in computational protein design and protein laboratory at Xencor. Through his work at Stanford, Dr. Luo discovered the fundamental mechanisms of protein folding and stability concerning the solvation of peptide backbone by cosolvents and amino acid side-chains.
Dr. Luo completed his postdoctoral research in protein folding with Dr. Robert L. Baldwin at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry under the guidance of Dr. David G. Lynn at The University of Chicago, M.S. degree in applied physics from The Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and B.S. degree in applied chemistry from Peking University.