Daniel Chen, Founder and CEO at Synthetic Design Lab
episode
Global Trial Accelerators™: Fast-Tracking First-in-Human Trials, Anywhere
53 min
8 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is Daniel Chen’s career background and how did he transition from bedside oncology to biotech entrepreneurship?
Welcome back to Global Trials Accelerators, the podcast where we dismantle the barriers to clinical innovation and explore the strategies driving the next generation of life-saving therapies. My guest today has arguably lived both halves of that journey. Daniel Chen is a physician scientist who spent years at the bedside treating melanoma patients, then spent more than a decade at Gentech leading the clinical development of T-centric, the first approved PDL1 inhibitor, from research all the way through the approval around the world. He has the He has co authored the The cancer immunology cycle, one of the most cited conceptual frameworks in modern immunology oncology. And today he's the founder and CEO of Synthetic Design Lab, a company building what is called Smart Cancer Drugs on an entirely new antibody drug conjecture architecture.
Dr. Chen, it's a real pleasure to have you with us today. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Uh Doctor, I would like to start talking about your background and the arc of your career because it's unusually broad. Going from bedside oncology, big pharma development, and now venture. into um Creating a startup Від сучь ново технології. The thread that really connects all those uh moments in your career seems to be clinical trials. Um you started running the melanoma clinical at Stanford. How did treating patients directly shape the way you design a trial today?
So, you know, it's interesting. I've been I'm old enough now that I have a there are a lot of cycles in my la life that I get I have completed. Um I feel like some of them are are pretty early in my training. So I did my undergraduate work at MIT. I wasn't an engineer. All my friends were engineers. Um, but that feels very relevant today. I did my physician. Scientist training at USC. Obviously, I've lived a life that walks between the world of clinical medicine and science. And then finally, I did my internal medicine training, my medical oncology training, my postdoc in immunology at Stanford.
How did treating melanoma patients shape Daniel’s approach to designing clinical trials?
And I stayed at Stanford where I treated patients with metastatic melanoma. When you're a scientist, but you're also a physician, um you certainly get to see a different side of the world we work in in terms of medicine. And Аза мпатики а за медико онкологіст. You unfortunately see a lot of tragedies. You see young people, old people, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children that lose their battle with cancer. And it's really, really hard. Um Those, those stories, those people's stories have lived with me my entire career. And it's part of what drives you to try to be able to do something better because you know the kind of personal suffering that happens in patients trying to fight a disease like cancer.
Of course this is a very uh complex subject both uh technically and uh from the humanitarian perspective, though how it affects lives in in How difficult it it is to walk through this with the patient. And I'm curious to know if living both those worlds, the bedside and the bench, the puzzle in the and at the bench uh taught you anything about How how to design or Um take into account the patient's experience when when approaching this type of clinical trial.
I mean, that's absolutely critical, right? Um, it can be very easy when you're running large clinical trials to think about what you're doing all as data points. Data points that either tell you if a drug works or doesn't work or works in one patient or another. Um, but when you s have spent time taking care of these patients, they're not data points. They're real people that when they have a side effect. They can really suffer with that side effect. They have emotional ups and downs. And even with something like the immune system, the immune system is particularly interesting because the immune system is actually actually very susceptible to changes in how you are feeling, whether you are ready to fight the disease or you're giving up.
Um, it can also be very susceptible to other changes in your life.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Daniel Chen’s career background and how did he transition from bedside oncology to biotech entrepreneurship?
0:08–2:54
2
How did treating melanoma patients shape Daniel’s approach to designing clinical trials?
2:54–10:09
3
What lessons did Daniel learn about patient experience and side‑effects while running early atezolizumab trials?
10:09–20:25
4
Which strategic decisions (indication, dosing, biomarkers) were critical to moving atezolizumab from research to global approval?
20:25–27:29
5
Why does Daniel believe engineered “smart drugs” are the next frontier for oncology and beyond?
27:29–36:03
6
How does Synthetic Design Lab’s multi‑tiered logic‑gated antibody platform work and what were its early technical challenges?
36:03–44:21
7
What role can AI and decentralized trial designs play in accelerating the development of complex biologics?
44:21–52:21
8
What does success look like for Synthetic Design Lab in the next five years—for patients and for the drug‑development industry?
52:21–53:27