Meet Hanjing Xie, MD PhD, Chief Medical Officer

2026-08-24

You have spent more than three decades working across clinical oncology, academic research and drug development. What inspired you to dedicate your career to oncology, and what continues to motivate you today?

Oncology has been the natural focus of my career because it brings together urgent patient need, scientific complexity, and the possibility of meaningful therapeutic progress. What continues to motivate me is unchanged: improving outcomes for patients by translating sound science into treatments that can make a real clinical difference. In the era of AI and rapid innovation in drug development, this mission has become even more promising, bringing us closer to meaningful success for patients.

Having worked both directly with cancer patients and in senior drug development roles, how has your clinical experience shaped the way you approach the development of new cancer treatments?

Direct clinical work with cancer patients gives a very clear understanding of what truly matters: efficacy, tolerability, feasibility, and timing. As a CMO, I bring this perspective into development strategy, trial design, endpoint selection, and benefit–risk assessment, always aiming to generate evidence that is scientifically robust, clinically relevant, and meaningful for patients.

What attracted you to Oncorena and its mission, and what excites you most about taking on the role of Chief Medical Officer at this stage of the company’s development?

I was attracted by Oncorena’s focused mission and the opportunity to advance a first-in-class treatment concept with a unique mechanism of action: leveraging renal-specific toxicity while sparing normal organ functions. This is particularly compelling in metastatic renal cell carcinoma, where patients on dialysis represent a vulnerable population with a substantial unmet medical need. Another important element is the people—individuals who are bold, courageous, deeply science-driven, and genuinely patient-centered; qualities that are essential to bringing truly innovative therapies forward.

As Chief Medical Officer, you will play a central role as Oncorena advances its clinical development program in metastatic renal cancer. What do you see as the most important priorities and opportunities ahead?

The key priorities are to advance the program with scientific discipline, ensure patient safety, and generate robust clinical data in a particularly vulnerable patient population. The opportunity is to define a clear development path for a first-in-class therapy that may selectively target renal cancer biology, leverage renal-specific toxicity, and preserve normal organ functions in metastatic renal cell carcinoma patients on dialysis, who have few established treatment options and limited physiological reserve.

Looking further ahead, what would you ultimately like Oncorena’s work to mean for patients with metastatic renal cancer and for the physicians treating them?

Ultimately, I would like Oncorena’s work to bring a scientifically grounded and clinically meaningful option to patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma who are on dialysis—a particularly fragile and underserved population. If we can demonstrate antitumor activity while preserving normal organ function, this would represent an important step forward for patients, treating physicians, and the broader field of cancer drug development. It would also show that innovation can and should be directed toward highly vulnerable patient populations with major unmet medical needs.