As Chief Scientific Officer, Xiaokui is leading the company’s current scientific programs, as well as future platform and pipeline investments for the autologous iPSC platform company.
Before joining Aspen, Xiaokui served as the Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at Celularity Inc., overseeing discovery, candidate development, preclinical, translational, process development and CMC activities to develop placenta-derived allogeneic, off-the-shelf cell therapy product candidates for immuno-oncology and functional regeneration applications, and serving as a member of the senior leadership team that took the company public in 2021. Xiaokui has also held various positions of increasing scope and responsibility at Celgene Cellular Therapeutics, and prior to Celgene, Xiaokui led a gene discovery team at Helicon Therapeutics and conducted target identification studies in cognitive disorders.
Xiaokui’s research in functional characterizations of JAK-STAT signaling pathways and placental progenitor cell differentiation has resulted in numerous patents and publications in highly ranked journals including Science. She has also served as a mentor to early-stage professionals in the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy (ISCT) and is the honoree of New Jersey Liberty Science Center Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Award.
Xiaokui received her undergraduate degree in Physiology from Nanjing University, Jiangsu, China, and her doctorate in Molecular Cell Biology from the Rockefeller University, New York, with further post-doctoral training in Functional Genomics at Novartis Pharmaceuticals.