Ci Chu, PhD profile page

Ci Chu is the Vice President of Early Discovery at Xaira Therapeutics, bringing over a decade of experience at the intersection of high-throughput biology and AI/ML-driven discovery biology. Previously, Chu served as the Senior Director of Advanced Cellular Technologies at insitro, where he led high-content phenotyping and functional genomics teams. His research leveraged complex human iPSC disease models in neurological and metabolic indications, combining pooled transcriptomic and optical screening with state-of-the-art machine learning to illuminate novel biology. Before insitro, Chu was the Genomics Tech Lead at Google[X]/Verily Life Sciences, where he co-developed the Immune Profiler platform, deployed in a 3-year, $90 million collaboration with Gilead to study inflammatory autoimmune diseases. Earlier in his career, Chu conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Genome Institute of Singapore, establishing single-cell RNA sequencing platforms aimed at mapping the human immune atlas. Chu completed his PhD at Stanford University under Dr. Howard Chang, where he invented ChIRP (Chromatin Isolation by RNA Purification), a groundbreaking RNA-interactome analysis method. His work revealed critical mechanisms of long-noncoding RNA mediated gene regulation, including the role of Xist RNA in X-chromosome inactivation, utilizing genomics, imaging and proteomics techniques. Chu is an accomplished scientist with five patents and many publications in prestigious journals such as Cell and Nature, collectively cited over 4,000 times.