Alyssa Morimoto

I received my B.A. in Biochemistry from Univ. of CA, Berkeley and my Ph.D. in Molecular Microbiology from SUNY at Stony Brook, studying oncogenic receptor tyrosine kinases. This was followed by post-doctoral fellowships at the Univ. of Washington in Seattle studying receptor tyrosine kinase signaling in Drosophila and at the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA studying the PTEN tumor suppressor phosphatase. Prior to joining Genentech in 2003, I did preclinical biomarker discovery and clinical translational oncology research on small molecule kinase inhibitors at SUGEN.

In my first 12 years at Genentech, my team and I were responsible for developing bioanalytical strategies and plans to support immunogenicity, PK and biomarker assessments for ophthalmology, oncology and immunology programs. I also was a Project Team Leader for a lupus development program and had the opportunity to contribute to multiple regulatory filings such as INDs and BLAs. After 12 years, I decided to try something new and changed my focus to biomarker development in the immunology space and joined the OMNI Biomarker Development group. My group and I get to develop biomarker strategies and plans which we hope will help identify groups of patients who might demonstrate an enriched clinical response to a given therapeutic. We also utilize biomarkers to demonstrate that our therapeutic is affecting the target and pathway of interest in support of clinical development.