Joan Chen

Joan Chen, PhD, has over 18 years of experience in the biopharma industry, with a focus on oncology for the past ten years. She has led many drug discovery, translational research programs and helped advanced a number of drug candidates from preclinical research into the clinical trials. Dr. Chen’s expertise in drug development includes target identification and validation, designing studies for mechanisms of action, pharmacodynamic response (both preclinical and clinical), machine learning and NGS data analysis in biomarker discoveries, generating disease hypotheses for patient selections in clinical trials.
Dr. Chen holds a PhD in Molecular, Cell and Development Biology with a specialization in bioinformatics from UCLA. She was a Bioinformatics Senior Scientist at eFFECTOR Therapeutics; Director of Bioinformatics at Certis Oncology; Research Fellow at Turning Point Therapeutics (acquired by BMS in 2022), and currently Senior Director at Boundless Bio.

Dr. Joan Chen is undoubtedly a seasoned expert in the field of bioinformatics, particularly in the realm of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis. With over 16 years of hands-on experience, her expertise spans various domains including whole-genome sequencing (WGS), whole-exome sequencing (WES), and RNA sequencing (RNAseq).
Currently, Dr. Chen holds a leadership position at Boundless Bio, where she heads the Bioinformatics team. In this role, she is instrumental in the development, optimization, and application of state-of-the-art bioinformatics algorithms. Her focus lies in ecDNA research, where she plays a pivotal role in advancing our understanding of ecDNA-mediated drug resistance. Additionally, her work contributes to the development of efficacious therapies aimed at addressing this challenge.