Janice Chen | |
---|---|
Born | 1990or1991(age 32–33) |
Alma mater | |
Occupation | Chief technology officer |
Employer | Mammoth Biosciences |
Relatives | Nathan Chen (brother) |
Janice Chen is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Mammoth Biosciences, a Brisbane, California-based company founded in 2018 that is developing diagnostic tests using CRISPR. [1] [2] [3] She received her B.S. degree from Johns Hopkins University and as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked in the lab of CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, receiving her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology. [3]
Along with two of her cofounders at Mammoth Biosciences, Chen was named to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list [4] and 2020 Business Insider's 30 Under 40 in Healthcare. [5] She was also selected to the 2020 Endpoints Top 20 Women in Biopharma, [6] and 35 Innovators Under 35 in MIT Technology Review in 2021. [7]
Chen grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is one of five siblings. [8] Her youngest brother is Olympic figure skater Nathan Chen. [9] Chen's parents immigrated to the United States from China in 1988. Chen competed in chess tournaments, where she was often the youngest and the only female. Chen discovered her love of science at her father's biotech business in Utah.
In 2017, Chen and fellow Berkeley classmate and researcher Lucas Harrington, along with their doctoral advisor, Nobel laureate and Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna, founded Mammoth Biosciences at a biotech incubator in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. In September 2021, Mammoth – now in a state-of-the-art facility in Brisbane, California – completed its seventh round of funding, raising US$195 million at a valuation of over US$1 billion. [8]
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Through his Harvard lab Church has co-founded around 50 biotech companies pushing the boundaries of innovation in the world of life sciences and making his lab as a hotbed of biotech startup activity in Boston. In 2018, the Church lab at Harvard made a record by spinning off 16 biotech companies in one year. The Church lab works on research projects that are distributed in diverse areas of modern biology like developmental biology, neurobiology, info processing, medical genetics, genomics, gene therapy, diagnostics, chemistry & bioengineering, space biology & space genetics, and ecosystem. Research and technology developments at the Church lab have impacted or made direct contributions to nearly all "next-generation sequencing (NGS)" methods and companies. In 2017, Time magazine listed him in Time 100, the list of 100 most influential people in the world. In 2022, he was featured among the most influential people in biopharma by Fierce Pharma, and was listed among the top 8 famous geneticists of all time in human history. As of January 2023, Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American chemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
Arie S. Belldegrun, FACS, is an Israeli-American urologic oncologist, billionaire businessman and investor.
Geoffrey von Maltzahn is an American biological engineer and businessman in the biotechnology and life sciences industry who has founded a number of companies including Indigo Agriculture, Sana Biotechnology, Kaleido Biosciences, Seres Therapeutics, Axcella Health, Generate Biomedicines and Tessera Therapeutics. He has over 200 bioengineering and biotechnology patents and applications.
Feng Zhang is a Chinese–American biochemist. Zhang currently holds the James and Patricia Poitras Professorship in Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also has appointments with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is most well known for his central role in the development of optogenetics and CRISPR technologies.
Ryan Bethencourt is an American scientist, entrepreneur, and biohacker best known for his work as co-founder and CEO of Wild Earth, Partner at Babel Ventures and cofounder and former Program Director at IndieBio, a biology accelerator and early stage seed fund. Bethencourt was head of life sciences at the XPRIZE foundation, a co-founder and CEO of Berkeley Biolabs, a biotech accelerator, and Halpin Neurosciences, an ALS therapeutics-focused biotech company. Bethencourt co-founded Counter Culture Labs, a citizen science nonprofit, and Sudo Room, a hacker space based in downtown Oakland, California.
Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. As of 2015, she has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. In 2020, Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing". This was the first science Nobel Prize ever won by two women only.
Editas Medicine, Inc.,, is a clinical-stage biotechnology company which is developing therapies for rare diseases based on CRISPR gene editing technology. Editas headquarters is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has facilities in Boulder, Colorado.
Intellia Therapeutics, Inc. is an American clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing novel, potentially curative therapeutics leveraging CRISPR-based technologies. The company's in vivo programs use intravenously administered CRISPR as the therapy, in which the company's proprietary delivery technology enables highly precise editing of disease-causing genes directly within specific target tissues. Intellia's ex vivo programs use CRISPR to create the therapy by using engineered human cells to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Jeffrey Leiden is an American businessman who is the executive chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company based in Boston, Massachusetts. He was initially appointed to the board of directors of the company in 2009 and was CEO and president from February 2012 to March 2020.
Rachel Elizabeth Haurwitz is an American biochemist and structural biologist. She is the co-founder, chief executive officer, and president of Caribou Biosciences, a genome editing company.
Locus Biosciences is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company, founded in 2015 and based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Locus develops phage therapies based on CRISPR–Cas3 gene editing technology, as opposed to the more commonly used CRISPR-Cas9, delivered by engineered bacteriophages. The intended therapeutic targets are antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
Anna Perdrix Rosell is a Spanish scientist who completed her PhD in cancer cell signalling at the Francis Crick Institute in London. She co-founded a biotech start-up, which helped her get onto the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2018.
Reshma Kewalramani, is the president and chief executive officer of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company based in Boston, Massachusetts, as of April 1, 2020. She is the first female CEO of a large US biotech company. She was previously the chief medical officer and vice president of global medicines development and medical affairs at Vertex.
CRISPR Therapeutics AG is a Swiss–American biotechnology company headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. It was one of the first companies formed to utilize the CRISPR gene editing platform to develop medicines for the treatment of various rare and common diseases. The company has approximately 500 employees and has offices in Zug, Switzerland, Boston, Massachusetts, San Francisco, California and London, United Kingdom. Its manufacturing facility in Framingham, Massachusetts won the Facilities of the Year Award (FOYA) award in 2022. The company’s lead program, exagamglogene autotemcel, or exa-cel, was granted regulatory approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2023.
Flagship Pioneering is an American life sciences venture capital company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that invests in biotechnology, life sciences, health and sustainability companies. Portfolio companies include Moderna, Indigo Agriculture, Inari Agriculture and Novomer. The firm both funds and incubates companies.
Mammoth Biosciences is a biotechnology company based in Brisbane, California developing diagnostic tests using CRISPR-Cas12a and CRISPR-based therapies using its proprietary ultra-small CRISPR systems. Several CRISPR-Cas systems identified through the company's metagenomics-based protein discovery platform, including members of the Casφ and Cas14 families of CRISPR-associated enzymes, have demonstrated potential for therapeutic genome editing in in vivo settings.
Sherlock Biosciences is a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts developing diagnostic tests using CRISPR-Cas13. The company was founded in 2019 by Feng Zhang, Jim Collins, Omar Abudayyeh, and Jonathan Gootenberg of the Broad Institute.
The Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) is a nonprofit scientific research institute founded by Nobel laureate and CRISPR gene editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna and biophysicist Jonathan Weissman. The institute is based at the University of California, Berkeley, and also has member researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, UC Davis, UCLA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Gladstone Institutes, and other collaborating research institutions. The IGI focuses on developing real-world applications of genome editing to address problems in human health, agriculture and climate change.