GV20 THERAPEUTICS, CO-FOUNDER & CEO

Dr. Xiaole Shirley Liu co-founded GV20 Therapeutics in 2016 and became the CEO of GV20 in 2022. She was a Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-director of the Center for Functional Cancer Epigenetics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her computational biology work refined our understanding of hormone receptor therapies, epigenetic inhibitors, gamma-secretase inhibitors, receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors, and immune checkpoint inhibitors in different cancers.

Dr. Liu is a highly cited researcher with a prodigious publication record that includes more than 200 papers published by her group, many in high-profile journals and highly cited. Shirley received the Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), has been a Breast Cancer Research Foundation Investigator (2017) and became a Fellow of ISCB (2019). In addition, she was recognized with the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences and the ISCB Innovator Award in 2020.

Recently, she was selected by the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) to its 2022 College of Fellows.

The central role of FcRn in regulating immunoglobulin G (IgG) persistence and transport provides opportunities for targeting this receptor in multiple different diagnostic and therapeutic situations. The engineering of IgGs with higher affinity for FcRn can be used to produce antibodies with longer in vivo half-lives, but only if the low affinity of the IgG-FcRninteraction at near neutral pH is retained. Conversely, an engineered IgG or Fc fragmentwith increased affinity for FcRn at both acidic and near neutral pH acts as a potent inhibitor of FcRn. Consequently, such an antibody (‘Abdeg’, for antibody that enhancesIgG degradation) can lower the levels of endogenous IgG and has led to the FcRn antagonist, efgartigimod, that has been developed by argenx and recently approved for the treatment of myasthenia gravis. Our recent work has also resulted in the generation of engineered Fc-fusions that selectively clear antigen-specific antibodies (‘Seldegs’, for selective degradation). Developments related to the modulation of the dynamic behavior of IgG in the bodywill be presented.