Charles Chen

Dr. Charles Chen is a Senior Scientist at AstraZeneca, a UK-Sweden-based pharmaceutical company, working on designing and synthesizing novel lipids for lipid nanoparticle-based delivery systems and focusing on vaccine delivery. Before joining AstraZeneca, Charles started his research journey when he was an undergraduate student and found his passion in drug development. Charles got his Ph.D. in Chemistry at King’s College London in UK under the supervision of Prof. Martin Ulmschneider. In 2019, Charles moved to Boston in the US and did a 2-year postdoc training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital and was co-supervised by Prof. Timothy Lu and Joanna Yeh.

Charles has led numerous projects and utilized molecular dynamics, a computational microscope, to investigate how small proteins interact with the cell membranes and combined this technique with high-throughput drug screening platforms. Interactions between small proteins and cell membranes have been a challenge for several decades, and it makes it difficult to rationally design the small proteins for drug development. Charles’ combinational approaches have shown promising outcomes in antibiotics and cancer chemotherapy and published more than 20 peer-reviewed papers and some international patents. His works have attracted great attention from industries and are under preclinical safety evaluation.