Alumni Profiles - Dr. Ju Liu

Dr. Ju Liu Brings UIC Lab Lessons to Senior Role at Eli Lilly

BY MICHAEL DHAR

While making her way through demanding UIC lab courses, Dr. Ju Liu, PhD ’05, developed skills that would help take her to a leadership position in drug development at Eli Lilly.

Joining the company as senior director of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK) in October 2022, Liu credits the late Dr. Judy Bolton’s lab at UIC with providing crucial knowledge and experience. “The research work in the lab was very important to prepare me as a scientist,” Liu said. “That’s why I was hired afterward with different labs and companies.”

Dr. Ju Liu

Liu helps in siRNA drug development from early research-and-development stages to clinical trials (siRNA, or small interfering RNA drugs, are RNA segments that can block gene expression). At each stage, she provides input on drug metabolism and kinetics—how the medicine gets converted into other compounds (metabolites) and how much remains available over time.

“I provide my input for how ADME [absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination] can support siRNA drug development, such as administration and absorption, major metabolites, and how the drug and metabolites get cleared,” she said.

In this work, Liu continues on from her focus in Dr. Bolton’s lab, where she investigated selective estrogen receptor modulators. “My training in medicinal chemistry and skills I learned from Dr. Bolton have greatly helped me in understanding siRNA ADME properties and provided me insights for study design, problem-solving, and creative thinking during my whole career,” she said.

After UIC, Liu completed a postdoc at MIT, studying drug metabolism via a bioreactor cell model. She next took a position at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, focusing on bioanalysis and DMPK of siRNA drugs for preclinical studies. After more than 12 years a Alnylam, Liu joined gene-editing company Prime Medicine as associate director of DMPK, studying the drug distribution of prime gene editors.

Among many career accomplishments, Liu said her proudest came in developing a liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry method at Alnylam for bioanalysis of siRNAs. “The method has been widely used for preclinical and clinical studies for siRNA drug development,” she said.

Still, to this day, Liu looks back fondly on experiences and accomplishments in UIC labs, including a pharmacology experiment to isolate microsomes induced by drugs in rat livers. “The experiment is so helpful to understand the different fractions of liver homogenates and the P450 [major drug metabolism enzyme] pathway, which are used for studying in vitro drug metabolism in industry,” she said.