P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Binbin Chen is an immigrant from China. Soon after arriving in the US, Binbin started studying at Georgia Tech where he was a biomedical engineering major. He published a first-author paper in The Journal of Translational Medicine as a sophomore, and was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship. As a senior, Binbin helped organize the first LGBT graduation reception for Georgia Tech, which was covered by the Atlanta NPR station.

With the support of PD Soros Fellowship, NIH MSTP training grant and Stanford Bio-X fellowship, he pursued a combined MD/PhD training at Stanford School of Medicine. During his PhD work 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 has more than 20 publications and patents for work at the intersection of immunology and machine learning. Inspired by his clinical work in oncology and the limitations of existing immunotherapies, Binbin co-founded Vcreate, a biotech company focusing on developing new treatments for late-stage cancer patients. He is currently the CEO of Vcreate and leads an interdisciplinary team that identifies cancer therapy candidates with a combination of high throughput screening and machine learning approaches.