Ci Chu

Ci Chu is Chief Discovery Officer at Xaira Therapeutics, where he leads high-throughput biology for virtual-cell data generation and therapeutic discovery. His work connects biological experiments with AI modeling: Xaira credits Chu and Chief AI Scientist Bo Wang jointly with contributions to X-Cell, its first virtual-cell model, and X-Atlas/Pisces, the dataset that powers it.[3]

Chu joined Xaira as VP of Early Discovery, then became SVP of AI-Enabled Discovery before his promotion to Chief Discovery Officer on July 6, 2026. His responsibilities center on generating experimental data for models and therapeutic design. Wang, the computational collaborator, is separately credited with pioneering X-Cell’s development.[3]

The Latent Space episode featuring Chu and Wang explains the experimental logic behind their teams’ work. Observing gene expression reveals relationships between cell types and states; reducing one gene’s activity and measuring the response helps identify which changes follow that intervention. Their teams use CRISPR-based experiments to generate perturbation data for X-Atlas and train X-Cell to predict cellular responses to changes in gene activity.[1]

Chu frames AI-driven drug discovery as dependent on experimental judgment. In his public promotion post, he wrote: “Drug discovery is, at its core, an experimental discipline.” He argued that AI requires appropriate biology, data and questions, and described his contributions as generating large-scale biological datasets, developing platforms that power models and advancing the discovery programs they enable.[4]

In Xaira’s July 2026 announcement, Chu identified available biological data as a constraint on AI drug discovery. He advocated improving data quality and scale while “closing the loop between our wet lab and dry modeling capabilities” to iterate toward therapies.[3]

Before Xaira, Chu developed biological measurement platforms in industry and academic research. Those earlier roles provide context for his present responsibility for experimental data generation.[2][5]

At insitro, Chu was Senior Director of Advanced Cellular Technologies, leading high-content phenotyping and functional genomics teams. Xaira’s biography describes his research as combining human induced pluripotent stem cell disease models for neurological and metabolic conditions with pooled transcriptomic screening, optical screening and machine learning.[2][3]

Before insitro, according to the same biography, Chu was Genomics Tech Lead at Google[X]/Verily Life Sciences and co-developed the Immune Profiler platform, used in a collaboration with Gilead to study inflammatory autoimmune diseases. Earlier, during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Genome Institute of Singapore, he established single-cell RNA sequencing platforms aimed at mapping the human immune atlas.[2]

Chu earned a B.S. at Duke University and completed his doctorate at Stanford under Howard Chang. The Chang Lab alumni record lists his graduate-student lab period as 2009–14 and credits him with inventing ChIRP-seq, a method for mapping where long noncoding RNAs occupy the genome. It also credits him with pioneering RNA-centric tools for studying the RNA interactome—the interactions involving RNA.[5][2]