Dr Michael Chen
Dr Michael Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Nuclera, a Cambridge and Boston-based biotechnology company he helped establish in 2013 while completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge. Born to immigrant parents who instilled early ambitions in medicine, Chen instead fell in love with scientific research during his undergraduate studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he developed a deep interest in structural biology before pursuing graduate work at the NIH and Cambridge. It was in Cambridge’s entrepreneurial ecosystem — shaped by pioneering scientists like Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian — that he met his co-founders and identified the problem that would define his career: the extraordinary cost and time required to produce proteins for drug discovery.
Chen’s doctoral research gave him firsthand experience of the protein accessibility bottleneck. His own PhD project required three and a half years to produce a single protein — a timeline he recognised as fundamentally incompatible with the pace that modern drug discovery demands. Alongside co-founders Jiahao Huang and Gordon McInroy, he founded Nuclera in 2013 with the mission to make proteins accessible to every scientist. The company spent its early years building prototypes under Cambridge’s SEIS tax incentive framework and Innovate UK grants, surviving a near-death funding crisis in 2018 before closing its first institutional round in 2019.
Under Chen’s leadership, Nuclera has grown to over 100 employees across its Cambridge and Boston sites and raised more than $140 million in funding, including a $75 million Series C led by Elevage Medical Technologies. The company’s eProtein Discovery™ system — combining cell-free protein synthesis, digital microfluidics, and AI — can produce milligrams of high-quality protein in under 48 hours, compared to the months or years required by conventional methods. It is now installed at leading pharmaceutical companies, contract research organisations, and academic institutions across Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific.
In January 2026, Nuclera extended its Series C by a further £9 million to fund the integration of full-format antibody expression, purification, and binding validation into the eProtein Discovery platform — targeting the rapidly growing AI-enabled biologics research market. Chen has been consistently recognised as a leading voice on protein science and the application of engineering principles to drug discovery, and Nuclera has been named to the UK’s Future Fifty programme alongside companies such as Monzo, Revolut, and Deliveroo.
