Dr. Shen has led oncology programs in a variety of pharmaceutical settings for over 15 years through all stages of drug development including IND filings, first-in-human trials, registrational trials, and NDA/BLA filings. While working in oncology clinical development at Novartis, Dr. Shen was extensively involved with in-licensing University of Pennsylvania’s CAR-T technology. She assembled and led the clinical team responsible for designing and launching the industry’s first multi-site, registration CAR-T trial, which resulted in the approval of Kymriah® (CTL019, CART-19). Prior to that, Dr. Shen made key contributions to the development of several oncology drugs within Novartis, Exelixis, and Johnson & Johnson that were subsequently approved. Dr. Shen is currently Vice President, Strategic Innovation Leaders at Mass General Brigham and has served as Chief Medical Officer (CMO) at multiple venture-backed biotech startups including Walking Fish, Arcellx, NKarta, Arvinas, and acting CMO of Tizona.
Dr. Shen has unique, deep knowledge of the cell and gene therapy landscape having provided clinical, regulatory, and strategic leadership for autologous and allogeneic CAR-T therapies, NK cell therapies, and other novel cell therapy programs across industry. She received a BS through Rensselaer’s accelerated biomedical program, and holds an MD from Albany Medical College in New York and MBA from New York University Stern School of Business.