Le Cong — Co-Founder

Building AI4Science Foundation Models and AI Agents for Biomedicine, Accelerating the Engineering of Life, be in on Earth, on Mars, and Beyond! Expertise in Gene Editing / Gene Therapy (CRISPR-Cas9 & TALEN), Genetic and Epigenetic Engineering, and Computational Genomics (single-cell analysis, machine learning and deep learning guided molecular design). Disease area focus on cancer immunology and neuro-degeneration. Published 20+ work in high-impact journals, also written for Springer’s Book Series Neuromethods and Methods in Molecular Biology. His work includes many of the most highly cited and widely applied publications in the field of genome engineering and gene therapy (Cong*, Ran*, et al. Science 2013. Ran*, Cong*, Yan*, et al. Nature 2015. Zhang*, Cong*, et al. Nature Biotechnology 2011) and more recently on novel gene-editing systems (Wang et al. Nature Cell Biology 2022), Machine-learning optimization of CRISPR design and single-cell genomics (Hughes et al. Molecular Cell 2022), and Deep Learning application in bio-molecular design (Yuan et al. NeurIPS 2022). Co-inventor of 10+ granted patents on CRISPR/TALEN and computational genomics technology. Dr. Le Cong obtained his B.S. (with highest honor) from Tsinghua University, his Ph.D. from Harvard University co-advised by Drs. Feng Zhang and George Church, and completed Postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute with Dr. Aviv Regev. He completed his thesis work primarily in Dr. Feng Zhang’s lab, where he did pioneering studies on genetic and epigenetic engineering, focusing on developing technologies based on TALE and CRISPR-Cas9 systems and adapting related technology for potential gene therapy applications. He then did research on single-cell genomics and systems biology in Dr. Regev's group with a focus on cancer immunology, before taking a junior faculty position at Stanford jointly in the department of pathology and genetics, with affiliation to Stanford Wu-Tsai Nuroscience Institute and Stanford Cancer Institute. His group has now pushed beyond CRISPR system to develop new gene-editing systems using metagenomic enzymes, and leveraged gene-editing, machine-learning design to build single-cell tracking and analysis methods to study cancer evolution and immunology.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a leader in Healthcare and Genomic Research.

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Experience: 15 yrs 9 mos