Jin-Long Chen spent fifteen years building NGM Biopharmaceuticals. Then he left and began another enterprise with a rather particular ambition: build individual companies around separate projects, while keeping the research organization together. In a business fond of the next new thing, continuity can be a surprisingly interesting proposition. The company changes; the accumulated experience gets to keep its desk.
His next chapter became TCG Labs Soleil, where he holds two jobs: managing partner of TCG Labs and co-founder and chief executive of Soleil. One side supplies a dedicated investment fund. The other supplies an ongoing research and development operation. The arrangement puts the person leading the laboratory organization inside the investment partnership as well. Decisions about capital and decisions about work have a common participant.
The sums attracted attention. The enterprise announced an inaugural fund of more than $400 million in February 2024, followed by an additional $400 million in July 2025. But the more revealing detail is what the organization intends to preserve between projects: its people. A transaction can change the ownership of a program without requiring the entire research group to become a temporary gathering.
That concern with the shape of an organization runs through Chen’s career. There are university laboratories, a smaller company absorbed by a larger one, a startup he founded, a long corporate collaboration, and now a fund linked to a continuing research hub. His biography contains several institutions. It also contains repeated attempts to decide how an institution should work.
Three degrees, then the company laboratory
Chen’s education began with a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and food science at Fu-Jen Catholic University. He earned a master’s in biochemistry at National Taiwan University, then a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate work examined transcription mechanisms in Robert Tjian’s laboratory. He completed the PhD in 1994. The progression took him through three universities and increasingly fundamental questions about how biology works.
The early industry chapter was Tularik, where he rose through research positions to vice president of biology. David Goeddel, Tularik’s co-founder and chief executive, became a recurring colleague. Amgen acquired Tularik in 2004. Chen subsequently held research leadership responsibilities at Amgen, including a vice presidency with a global remit. He had worked inside both a smaller research company and a much larger organization before founding his own.
Those are distinct sorts of professional experience. A university laboratory, an independent company, and a global corporation organize people and decisions differently. Chen’s later ventures make more sense when placed beside that sequence. His move into entrepreneurship followed years of responsibility for research teams. The scientific founder arrived with experience of the machinery surrounding an experiment, as well as the experiment itself.
The first company, and the people who returned
NGM announced its formation in February 2008 with $25.5 million in Series A financing. Chen was its founder, president, and chief scientific officer. The Column Group led the financing; Prospect Venture Partners and Rho Ventures were co-lead investors. Goeddel became chairman and acting chief executive. Peter Svennilson joined the board. Several names in Chen’s later enterprise were already around the table.
The arrangement matters to his story because it makes the next beginning less mysterious. TCG Labs Soleil grew from relationships that had already survived several professional settings. A founder can acquire a fresh company name rather quickly. A shared working history takes longer, and resists the usual shortcuts. By the 2024 launch, Svennilson described a friendship and professional association with Chen extending over twenty years.
Chen remained NGM’s president until November 2014 and its chief scientific officer until April 2023. In between, the business developed relationships of its own. A 2015 agreement with Merck included a $94 million upfront payment, a $106 million purchase of a 15 percent equity stake, and a commitment of up to $250 million for the initial five-year research term. These were distinct parts of a collaboration, with different purposes and conditions.
NGM retained discretion to pursue discovery work under that arrangement, while Merck brought later development and commercial capabilities. Chen publicly emphasized the combination of the two companies’ strengths. The structure gave a smaller research organization a relationship with a much larger partner. Years before Soleil, his career already included the practical question of where one organization’s work should meet another’s.
The financial figures describe the company’s agreements. They also mark the changing scale of the institution Chen had founded. NGM went from a privately financed startup to a business with a substantial corporate research relationship and, in April 2019, a public listing. Chen stayed in scientific leadership through that transition. The founder’s title remained; the organization around it changed considerably.
A conversation beside a student’s poster
At Berkeley in September 2017, Chen appeared in a setting with a more human scale. A photograph from the inaugural Molecular and Cell Biology Industrial Affiliates Program symposium shows him speaking with undergraduate Bianca Filart beside her research poster. The photograph catches a conversation about work. Neither participant needs a podium, and the poster has considerably more to say than a business card.
NGM was one of the program’s founding member companies, alongside Agenovir, Amgen, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. The symposium connected industry representatives with university researchers at different career stages. Sixteen undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers presented posters. Chen was returning as both a Berkeley alumnus and a company founder, a combination that gave the occasion a personal connection to his earlier training.
He described Berkeley as the place where he learned scientific vision and boldness. His recollection of his teachers was about learning to contribute new knowledge rather than merely absorbing a textbook. He also expressed enthusiasm for helping younger researchers find their own paths. The message was well suited to the room: an established founder standing beside work being explained by someone much earlier in her career.
The scene offers a useful counterweight to the financing announcements. Chen’s public career includes amounts large enough to occupy a headline, but it also includes participation in the less theatrical work of connecting students and employers. At the poster session, the relationship between academia and industry had an ordinary, visible form: two people discussing research across a difference in experience.
“UC Berkeley is where I learned about scientific vision and the need for boldness.”
Jin-Long Chen · Berkeley, 2017
Leaving after fifteen years
Chen’s departure from NGM took effect on April 4, 2023. He resigned as chief scientific officer and as a director. The announcement came as NGM undertook a restructuring that eliminated 75 positions, approximately one-third of its workforce. It was a difficult company moment, and it belongs in the account of his transition. A founder’s next beginning can share a date with an institution’s painful adjustment.
NGM’s chief executive, David Woodhouse, described Chen’s departure as a separate development and credited him with building a scientific leadership team capable of continuing the work. Dan Kaplan became chief scientific officer. In his own public message, Chen marked the fifteen-year span and said he was moving to a new chapter. He did not make the announcement a lengthy autobiography.
The responses supplied a small portrait of how colleagues had experienced him. Cecilia Tran-Muchowski described him as a supportive leader and mentor. Oleg Efimov thanked him for making NGM a home for talented people and ideas. These are colleagues’ assessments, attached to a particular farewell. They give the institutional history something a list of job titles cannot: individual voices from people who worked there.
He also served on Tenaya Therapeutics’ board from October 2016. In June 2024, Tenaya announced he was stepping down after more than seven years to focus on other commitments, including TCG Labs Soleil. The new enterprise was becoming a substantial commitment. The sequence is clear even without embellishment: the NGM departure in 2023, the fund launch in February 2024, and the board departure that June.
A laboratory with more than one company to build
At Soleil, a research hub supports separate portfolio companies, each organized around an individual asset. TCG Labs supplies dedicated capital. The structure allows different projects to have their own corporate identities while drawing on a continuing central organization. Chen’s dual appointment puts him at the junction. He participates in financing as a managing partner and leads the operating enterprise as chief executive.
His collaborators include Svennilson and Tim Kutzkey at TCG Labs. Goeddel was named chair of the scientific advisory board at launch. Soleil’s co-founders include chief operating officer Lucinda Quan and chief science officer Josh Lichtman; Lichtman had previously spent more than eight years at NGM. The personnel history gives the new structure a recognizable cast, with experience carried from earlier organizations into new responsibilities.
The model makes room for ideas originating inside the hub and projects coming from outside it. Separate companies can pursue partnerships or transactions while the central team continues working. This arrangement has an appealing economy of organization: a new venture does not automatically require every capability to be assembled afresh. Whether that economy produces the intended results is a question for the work and its outcomes.
By July 2025, the enterprise reported more than ten portfolio companies and an expanded presence in Shanghai alongside its South San Francisco headquarters. The additional fund announcement belonged to that stage of expansion. Those milestones describe capital raised, companies formed, and geographic reach. They are useful measures of activity, with their own boundaries; a financing announcement cannot do the work of an operating result.
For Chen, the continuity is visible in both people and subject matter. He keeps returning to the organization of research: who works together, how the work is financed, and what survives when a project moves into another institution. His Berkeley training, NGM tenure, and Soleil responsibilities put those questions in different settings. The latest company gives one answer a formal structure: let individual ventures move forward, and give the team another project to begin.