Bin Chen: Collaborating Against Cancer

My name is Bin Chen, I’m an assistant professor in the College of Medicine. The long interest of my lab is to use big data and artificial intelligence to discover new therapeutics, especially for cancer.

The idea is a very brand new idea, it’s basically trying to use the immune system, trying to develop large molecules to induce the immune system to kill the cancer cells.

So currently, the cancer immunotherapy, only 20% of patients respond to the checkpoint inhibitors. Which means there are about 80% of patients who don’t respond to the immunotherapy.

So how can we find these responders, non-responders? We need the data to help understand. And there is tons of data publicly available. And our technologies help them to use the big, currently open, big data, to understand the non-responders.

In therapeutic discovery, there’s always a concern that’s about IP (intellectual property). And this is quite new to both my lab, and also the company, and we want to have someone who can help us protect the interests of both parties.

The Innovation Center was very helpful to help us establish this collaboration.

It’s quite an exciting field, frankly, but also quite new to me. And so we think maybe we can use our big data facility, our infrastructure, to help the cancer immunotherapy. So that’s why I’m very passionate about the partnership with this company.