Associate Professor Yen Choo

Affiliation

Associate Professor of Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine

Profile

Dr Yen Choo is Associate Professor of Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKC Medicine), a joint medical school of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Imperial College London. He is also Executive Director of co11ab@Novena, a BioMedtech incubator established jointly between NTU, National Healthcare Group (HNG) and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

In addition to his academic career, Prof. Choo is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of C-level and Board experience in industry, specifically in biotechnology companies developing advanced therapies. He was the founder and CSO of Gendaq, the biotech company that developed the zinc finger DNA-binding technology used for gene editing (acquired by Sangamo Therapeutics). He is the founder and Chairman of Plasticell, one of the UK’s pioneering advanced therapy companies focused on combinatorial screening technologies for stem cell applications. He was also the founder of Progenitor Therapeutics, a company established jointly with GSK to discover small molecule drugs that regenerate tissues of the human body.

In addition to his role on the BOC of ACTRIS, Prof. Choo sits on the Steering Committee for the UK Stem Cell Bank and for the Use of Stem Cell Lines which oversees UK embryonic stem cell research and the UK Stem Cell Bank.

He obtained his PhD in Molecular Biology in 1995 from the University of Cambridge, England, working on the design of sequence-specific protein-DNA interactions at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Nobel laureate Sir Aaron Klug.