Ming-Tang Chen

Senior Director
​PharmaEssentia Innovation Research Center

Ming-Tang Chen is the Senior Director of Biologics Platform at PharmaEssentia Innovation Research Center. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, he leads the company’s biologics discovery and platform development efforts, focusing on innovative therapeutic protein design and antibody engineering.
 
Before joining PharmaEssentia, Ming-Tang was a Principal Scientist in the Discovery Biologics group at Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD). He was a key knowledge holder and inventor of the GlycoFi glycoengineered yeast Pichia pastoris recombinant protein surface display and expression platform. Ming-Tang established MSD proprietary state-of-the-art yeast display systems for antibody and protein engineering. He led the Biologics Design and Display group, overseeing strategy, project intake, resource planning, and execution for lead identification and optimization across multiple therapeutic areas. His team supported a broad range of biologic modalities, including multi-specific and fusion protein engineering, monoclonal antibody and ADC discovery, development candidate nomination, and reagent generation. Their work spanned early research through to preclinical and clinical development stages.
 
Prior to MSD, Ming-Tang earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Princeton University, where he trained in synthetic biology under Dr. Ron Weiss, developing and implementing synthetic gene regulatory circuits in microbial systems. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University.

Speech title & Synopsis

Immunocytokines: Bridging Antibody Specificity with Cytokine Efficacy for Precise Immune Modulation

Cytokines are powerful immunoregulatory proteins that orchestrate both innate and adaptive immune responses and hold tremendous promise for enhancing cancer immunotherapy. However, the clinical application of cytokine therapies—such as high-dose interleukin-2 (IL-2)—has been hindered by challenges including systemic toxicity, pleiotropic signaling, narrow therapeutic windows, and dose-limiting adverse effects.
Immunocytokines, which fuse cytokines to monoclonal antibodies or antibody fragments, represent a promising strategy to overcome these limitations. By directing cytokine activity to specific cell types or tumor sites, immunocytokines aim to concentrate immune activation within the tumor microenvironment, reduce systemic exposure, and enhance antitumor efficacy.
This presentation will highlight recent advances in immunocytokine design and engineering that address key pharmacokinetic and safety challenges. Particular attention will be given to antibody-cytokine fusion proteins that leverage checkpoint molecules, such as anti-PD-1, to deliver attenuated cytokine muteins specifically to tumor-reactive CD8+ T cells. These next-generation constructs demonstrate improved selectivity, reduced off-target effects, and robust antitumor immune responses in preclinical and clinical studies.
We will also explore emerging tools—such as structure-guided design and AI/ML-enabled protein engineering—that are accelerating the development of cytokines with optimized activity, stability, and manufacturability.
Together, these innovations mark a new era in cytokine-based immunotherapy, offering the potential for safer, more effective treatments either as monotherapies or in synergistic combination with checkpoint inhibitors, cellular therapies, or other immuno-oncology modalities.