Dr. Hongtao Lu is currently co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Elpiscience Biopharma, a biotech company focusing on immuno-oncology. Trained as an immunologist and a 20-year industry veteran, he has worked on several therapeutic areas (autoimmune diseases, oncology and neuroscience) using both small-molecule and biological approaches. Before Elpiscience, he had spent four years with Zai Lab, a NASDAQ-listed company, as co-founder and CSO and helped to build a robust pipeline focusing on oncology and autoimmune diseases. Prior to Zai Lab, he was with GlaxoSmithKline as the founding head and senior director of Neuroimmunology Discovery Performance Unit (NI-DPU), where he led about 70 biologists and chemists focusing on drug discovery in multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson's disease and had successfully built the team and the pipeline from scratch in 5 years with four clinical assets and four pre-clinical programs.

Dr. Lu spent his early career with Berlex Biosciences and Bayer Schering Pharma, where he conducted target identification and validation in autoimmune inflammatory diseases and oncology. Dr. Lu holds a Ph.D. in Regulatory Biology and conducted his graduate research at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, focusing on MHC class II gene regulation followed by post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine under the guidance of Dr. Richard Flavell, working on T cell differentiation and signal transduction pathway. He got his Bachelor degree at the Biology Department of Xiamen University in 1987.