Jean Cui
She draws molecules that beat the mutations that beat the last drug. Resistance is the whole point.
J. Jean Cui, Ph.D. - she designs the compound herself, then builds the company around it. San Diego, California.
A chemist running her own pharmacy of one
In a lab near UC San Diego, Jean Cui is doing the thing most biotech CEOs hire other people to do. She designs the molecule. As Scientific Founder, President and CEO of BlossomHill Therapeutics, she runs a small-molecule company whose lead programs trace back to a sketch she could draw on a whiteboard - a macrocyclic OMNI-EGFR inhibitor called BH-30643 and a CLK inhibitor called BH-30236.
Most founders pitch a deck. Cui pitches a shape. Her whole career rests on a single, stubborn idea: when a targeted cancer drug stops working, it is usually because the tumor mutated the binding site. So redesign the molecule to fit anyway. At Turning Point Therapeutics she turned that idea into a macrocyclic platform - rings of atoms folded compactly enough to slip past the very mutations that disable everything else.
BlossomHill is the second act. She and longtime partner Y. Peter Li founded it after Bristol Myers Squibb bought Turning Point for $4.1 billion in 2022. Rather than retire on the proceeds, she started over. The new company widened the aim: cancer resistance, yes, but also autoimmune disease, with the same intelligently-engineered small molecules at the center.
In December 2025 BlossomHill announced an $84 million financing, pushing total capital raised to $257 million, earmarked to push its wholly-owned pipeline deeper into the clinic. Updates from the Phase 1/2 SOLARA trial of BH-30643 and the first-in-human study of BH-30236 are expected through 2026.
The file
Why "BlossomHill"?
A botanical, optimistic name for a company built on hard chemistry. The science is austere. The branding is a garden.
Three drugs. The same hand.
Most chemists spend a career hoping for one approved medicine. Cui has led the design of three, each one answering the resistance left behind by the one before it.
The first
Lead inventor at Pfizer. FDA fast-tracked it in 2011 for ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer. Named National Inventor of the Year the same year.
The answer
Designed as the next-generation ALK medicine to fight the resistance that defeated the first. Recognized by the ACS Heroes of Chemistry program.
The macrocycle
Built on her macrocyclic platform. Earned three FDA Breakthrough Therapy designations and approval in 2023 for ROS1-positive NSCLC.
From Hefei to the National Academy
The path was not short. Cui earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Science and Technology of China, then crossed the Pacific for a doctorate at Ohio State University. Postdoctoral training followed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley - the West Coast research corridor she never really left.
Her first industry home was SUGEN, the kinase-focused biotech later folded into Pharmacia, where she worked as project and group leader. From there she moved to Pfizer's La Jolla site as a Senior Principal Scientist and Associate Research Fellow. That is where crizotinib happened - and where the resistance problem became her life's question.
In 2013 she co-founded Turning Point Therapeutics and served as Chief Scientific Officer until 2020, building a pipeline of compounds aimed squarely at drug resistance. The company went public on NASDAQ in 2019. Three years later Bristol Myers Squibb acquired it. The chemistry, in other words, kept paying for itself.
Election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024 placed her among the highest professional honors an engineer can receive in the United States - notable for a chemist whose engineering is measured not in bridges but in molecules that end up in pharmacies.