image: At Insilico, Dr. Chen is responsible for guiding the Company’s strategies, corporate development, and global business development, and she has led numerous strategic partnering agreements on Insilico’s novel AI-designed drugs with leading pharmaceutical companies
Credit: Insilico Medicine
Michelle Chen, Ph.D., Chief Business Officer of clinical stage artificial intelligence (AI)-powered drug discovery company Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”) was named one of this year’s Top 25 Biotechnology Executives by the Healthcare Technology Report, a leading provider of healthcare sector news and research. Selections were based on both nominations and industry research, including achievements and expertise in the field and demonstrated leadership skills as well as the company's recent and long term performance, technological advancements, scientific leadership, and organizational strength.
At Insilico, Dr. Chen is responsible for guiding the Company’s strategies, corporate development, and global business development, and she has led numerous strategic partnering agreements on Insilico’s novel AI-designed drugs with leading pharmaceutical companies, including Sanofi, Exelixis and Menarini. The deal she led with Sanofi was one of the Company’s largest to date, a multi-target collaboration with a deal size of up to $1.2 billion, in addition to royalties.
“I am honored to be recognized by the Healthcare Technology Report. More than that, I am glad to play a part by advancing innovative therapies and technologies to help people live healthier lives,” said Dr. Chen.
Dr. Chen brings over 20 years of experience in R&D, commercial, and business and corporate development in the biopharma and technology industries, and has worked at multinational companies such as Roche, Merck, BioMarin, and Agilent, as well as small biotech companies. Her strong track record includes company building, mergers and acquisitions, business development and licensing, investment, marketing, and R&D.
“We are very pleased that Michelle’s efforts are being recognized by the broader industry,” says Insilico Medicine founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD. “She is committed to growing and licensing our assets and advancing new therapies for patients in need.”
Insilico Medicine is a pioneer in using generative AI for drug discovery and development. The Company first described the concept of using generative AI for the design of novel molecules in a peer-reviewed journal in 2016. Then, Insilico developed and validated multiple approaches and features for its generative adversarial network (GAN)-based AI platform and integrated those algorithms into the commercially available Pharma.AI platform, which includes generative biology, chemistry, and medicine and has been used to produce a robust pipeline of promising therapeutic assets in multiple disease areas, including fibrosis, cancer, immunology and aging-related disease, a number of which have been licensed. Since 2021, Insilico has nominated 18 preclinical candidates in its comprehensive portfolio of over 30 assets and has advanced seven pipelines to the clinical stage. In March 2024, the Company published a paper in Nature Biotechnology that discloses the raw experimental data and the preclinical and clinical evaluation of its lead drug – a potentially first-in-class TNIK inhibitor for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis discovered and designed using generative AI currently in Phase II trials with patients – the first such drug to reach this milestone.
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, a global clinical-stage biotechnology company powered by generative AI, connects biology, chemistry, and clinical trial analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques for novel target discovery and generating novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is developing breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system diseases, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and aging-related diseases. www.insilico.com