Allen S. Yang, MD, Ph.D., is our Chief Medical Officer and leads the Research and Clinical Development teams.

Prior to joining Summit, Allen was the Chief Medical Officer at Xencor Inc where he led the development of Xencor‘s pipeline of novel engineered proteins in oncology and autoimmune diseases. Before Xencor, Allen was at Jazz Pharmaceuticals PLC where he started as the Therapeutic Head for Hematology / Oncology and rose to Head of Clinical Development and acting CMO. He has also served as VP of Clinical Research at Spectrum Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Allen started his career in industry at Amgen, Inc. where he had several roles of increasing responsibility and worked on romiplostim, blinatumomab and arbepoetin alfa. During his career he has led or been a part of numerous drug approvals including, liposomal cytarabine-daunorubicin, asparaginase erwinia chrysanthemi (recombinant)-rywn, defibrotide, solriamfetol, captisol-enabled melphalan, and blinatumomab.

Allen holds an MD and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Molecular Biology and Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and his Medical Oncology fellowship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. He was also the Chief Fellow in his final year at MD Anderson. He practiced for several years a­­s an academic oncologist at the University of Southern California seeing patients and running a translational cancer research laboratory. He has been awarded several awards and grants during his academic career including the ASCO Young Investigator Award and the ASCO Career Development Award. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications during his academic and industry careers.