Meet the team.
Our team brings together skill sets across immunology, molecular biology, single cell sequencing and machine learning to understand T-cell function in disease and address unmet clinical needs via TCR-based therapies.
Leadership.
Binbin Chen.
CEO
Ethan Fast.
CTO
Manjima Dhar.
VP of Cell Engineering
Scientific advisors.
Russ Altman.
Kenneth Fong Professor
Stanford University
Lisa Wagar.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics
University of California
Michael Khodadoust.
Assistant Professor · Oncologist
Stanford Medicine · Stanford Cancer Center
Eric Horvitz.
Chief Scientific Officer
Microsoft
Strategic advisors.
Ron Alfa.
Physician-scientist and Biotech Entrepreneur
Rich Yu.
Co-founder and CEO
Abalone Bio
Gunsagar Gulati.
Physician-scientist and Hematology/Oncology Fellow
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Hanadie Yousef.
Co-founder and CEO
Juvena Therapeutics
Interested in joining us?
Please reach out to contact@vcreate.io.
Binbin Chen.
Co-founder and CEO
Binbin Chen is co-founder and CEO of Vcreate. He received MD/PhD from Stanford and has more than 20 publications and patents for work at the intersection of immunology and machine learning. During his PhD with Ash Alizadeh and Russ Altman, he developed MARIA, a state-of-the-art deep learning algorithm for predicting cancer antigen presentation (Chen et al. Nature Biotech 2019). MARIA is now used by more than 200 institutions across the world. Binbin is a Stanford Bio-X fellow and a PD Soros Fellow for New Americans. Inspired by his clinical work in oncology and the limitations of existing immunotherapies, Binbin started Vcreate to develop new treatments for late-stage cancer patients.
Ethan Fast.
Co-founder and CTO
Ethan Fast is a co-founder and CTO of Vcreate. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, where he worked at the intersection of human-computer interaction and machine learning. Ethan and Binbin have collaborated for more than 7 years with 6 shared research publications. Ethan is a YC alum and at one of his previous companies, Nash, he built up a 40 person engineering team as CTO.
Manjima Dhar.
VP of Cell Engineering
Manjima Dhar is VP of Cell Engineering at Vcreate. She received a PhD in Bioengineering from University of California at Los Angeles, where she developed high throughput technologies to isolate and profile rare circulating tumor cells at a single cell level. She previously worked at Poseida Therapeutics and PACT Pharma.
Russ Altman, MD/PhD.
Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine, Biomedical Data Science and Computer Science · Stanford University
Russ Altman, MD/PhD is the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine, Biomedical Data Science and Computer Science and past chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing (AI, data science and informatics) to problems relevant to medicine. His lab studies how human genetic variation impacts drug response. He helps lead an FDA-supported Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science & Innovation. Russ has published more than 380 scientific manuscripts and patents. He was a member of FDA Commissioner Science Board and co-founder of Personalis (NASDAQ: PSNL), a publicly traded precision health company.
Lisa Wagar, PhD.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics · University of California
Lisa Wagar, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine where her lab studies human vaccine responses and develops tools to investigate human adaptive immunity. Lisa is passionate about translational human immunology and collaborative efforts to improve and accelerate vaccine design for infectious diseases of global concern. During her postdoctoral fellowship with Mark Davis at Stanford she developed a human immune organoid platform to study adaptive immune responses without the bias of mouse models.
Michael Khodadoust, MD/PhD.
Assistant Professor · Stanford Medicine
Michael Khodadoust, MD/PhD is an Assistant Professor at Stanford Medicine and an attending oncologist at Stanford Cancer Center. He received his MD/PhD from University of Michigan has more than 12 years of clinical experience and helped conduct multiple cancer clinical trials. His lab focuses on the interaction between the immune system and cancer to develop more effective immunotherapies.
Eric Horvitz, MD/PhD.
Chief Scientific Officer · Microsoft
Eric Horvitz, MD/PhD is Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft, where he provides cross-company leadership and perspectives on advances and trends on scientific matters, and on issues and opportunities rising at the intersection of technology, people, and society. Eric received his MD/PhD from the Stanford School of Medicine. His research interests center on challenges with uses of AI amidst the complexities of the open world, including uses of probabilistic and decision-theoretic representations for reasoning and action, models of bounded rationality, and human-AI complementarity and coordination. Eric is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ron Alfa, MD/PhD.
Physician-scientist and biotech entrepreneur
Ron Alfa, MD/PhD is a physician-scientist and biotech entrepreneur. He received his MD and PhD from Stanford School of Medicine. He was the Head of Research at Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: RXRX), where he led therapeutics teams in both discovery and development for programs in rare disease, oncology, immunology, and neuroscience. He is a co-founder of the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (AAIH) and currently CEO of Noetik, a AI-native biotechnology company focusing on precision oncology.
Rich Yu, PhD.
Co-founder and CEO · Abalone Bio
Richard Yu, PhD is the co-founder and CEO of Abalone Bio, a platform therapeutics company. Richard received his PhD from Molecular Biology from Yale. At Abalone Bio, he leads efforts to develop bioactive antibody therapeutics for difficult-to-drug membrane protein targets using a novel platform for antibody agonist discovery. He was previously a co-manager of the QB3 biotech incubator space, an advisor for Mission Bay Capital, and founded two other biotech companies.
Gunsagar Gulati, MD/PhD.
Physician-scientist and Hematology/Oncology Fellow · Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Gunsagar Gulati, MD/PhD is a Hematology/Oncology Fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Mass General Brigham. Gunsagar received his MD/PhD from the Stanford School of Medicine. He is interested in the crossroads of computer science, cellular biology, and clinical medicine, where he is leveraging recent advances in single-cell genomics and epigenomics to study normal and neoplastic stem cell biology to address human cancer. Gunsagar is the author of more than 30 high impact publications and several bioinformatics tools for genomic analysis including CytoTRACE.
Hanadie Yousef, PhD.
Co-founder and CEO · Juvena Therapeutics
Hanadie Yousef, PhD is the co-founder and CEO of Juvena Therapeutics, a computationally driven protein drug platform company. Hanadie earned her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and did her postdoctoral work with Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford University. Juvena Therapeutics has raised more than $60M to develop biologics for rare and chronic, life-threatening diseases by mining the secretomes of human stem cells for their therapeutic potential using proteomics and machine learning-enhanced discovery.