David Chang

CEO
WuXi Advanced Therapies Business Unit (ATU)

​Dr. David Chang has 30-year industrial experience, and is currently the CEO of Wuxi AppTec Advanced Therapies Business Unit located in Philadelphia, PA.  Prior to current role, he was Corporate VP and Head of Cell Therapy Global Manufacturing, of Celgene Corporation; the Global Head of Engineering and Strategy at Roche based in Basel, Switzerland; the VP/Site Head of Roche Shanghai Technical Operations in China.  Earlier in his career, Dr. David Chang worked at Genentech as the Senior Director of Global Manufacturing Science and Technology, and as the Director of Process Development in its Oceanside, CA site.  He was also formerly at Biogen Idec as Director of cell culture R&D, at BASF Bioresearch as a cell culture group leader, and at Schering-Plough Research Institute as a process development engineer.

Dr. David Chang obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from National Taiwan University in Taiwan, and the Master’s and PhD degrees in Biochemical Engineering​ from MIT in Massachusetts, USA.


 

Speech title & Synopsis

New Transformational Technologies for High-Quality and Cost-Effective Viral Vector Production to Enable Cell & Gene Therapies Development

Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) and Lenti Viral Vector (LVV) have been the key work horses for gene therapies and gene-mediated cell therapies.  The current standard platforms for producing AAV and LVV are mainly based on plasmid-dependent transient expression which typically encounters the limitation of scalability, high cost of plasmids, lower viral yield and less percentage of infectious VV.  Lately, the plasmid-independent AAV production platform, TessaTM, and LVV production platform, LentiVEX-StableTM, have been developed by WuXi Advanced Therapies Business Unit (ATU).  These transformational VV production platforms significantly improve the yield and the percentage of infectious VV as well as overcome the limitation of scalability.  These improvements will significantly reduce the cost of goods for VV production, and thus enable the development of cell and gene therapies with broader patient access in the future.
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