Chao Zhang

Biography

 Dr. Zhang has served as Plexxikon’s senior vice president of research since November 2015 and has more than 15 years of pharmaceutical discovery experience. He joined Plexxikon in 2001 as associate director of bioinformatics and became director of informatics in 2004, leading the company’s efforts in both computational chemistry and computational biology. Dr. Zhang assumed additional responsibilities in 2008 when the structural biology and informatics teams were merged to strengthen the company’s core expertise in structure-guided drug design. Dr. Zhang helped build the scaffold-based drug discovery platform at Plexxikon, and has been a leader and key contributor to the company’s wealth of discovery efforts. Dr. Zhang was instrumental in the discovery of Zelboraf®, Plexxikon’s first oncology drug now approved in the U.S. and many other countries. Prior to Plexxikon, Dr. Zhang was a scientist at Incyte Genomics where he developed an integrated genomics information system for mining disease-related genes and novel drug targets. Dr. Zhang earned his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Boston University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.

Research Interest

 biomedical science