Hao Lu

Hao Lu is the Director of Discovery Pharmacology and Head of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at EMD Serono (A business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany). His team supports discovery projects in Immune-Oncology, Immunology and Oncology by leveraging state-of-art technologies to study in vitro pharmacology, including high throughput target-based screening, phenotypic screening, target engagement and degradation and molecular profiling. Prior to the current position, he worked at Bristol-Myers Squibb (Princeton, NJ) as senior research investigator. His primary research efforts were dedicated to developing biochemical and biophysical assays and designing comprehensive mechanistic tools to select advanced candidates for clinical studies. He also championed a paradigm shift in high throughput screening to include kinetic and mechanistic information at early stage of drug discovery. Hao received his Ph.D. at Stony Brook University where he was focused on understanding the relation between drug’s residence time (reciprocal of dissociation rate) and it in vivo efficacy.