“As a young founder who came from a blank slate, the power is to see beyond what’s traditional… [it] allows us to create a movement and reshape the future that way.”
Janice Chen is the co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences, a biotechnology company harnessing a revolutionary gene-editing tool called CRISPR – used for rapid and affordable disease detection.
During her time as a graduate student under CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, Chen studied how DNA-cutting CRISPR proteins recognize and cut their target, thus enabling more precise gene-editing tools. Chen sees the enormous potential in new diagnostic tools developed out of CRISPR biology, from identifying bacterial and viral infections to early cancer detection.
Chen received her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.