Today Yuanyuan Xu runs a clinical-stage biotech from Suzhou Industrial Park, a place engineered specifically to turn scientists into companies. Cure Genetics, the firm she founded in July 2016, is small on paper - roughly a dozen people - and outsized in ambition: first-in-class cell and gene therapies for solid tumors and inherited disease, the two corners of medicine where the failure rate is highest and the patients have run out of other doors to knock on.
The work splits into two bets. One is a cell therapy platform called AIMS CAR-NKT, built on invariant natural killer T cells - a rarer, stranger cousin of the T cells that power conventional CAR-T. The other is VELP, a directed-evolution engine for designing new AAV capsids, the protein shells that ferry genetic payloads into the body. One platform attacks tumors. The other rebuilds the delivery truck. Xu wants both, which tells you something about how she thinks: not in products, in platforms.
That instinct comes from where she started. Xu earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Biology at Tsinghua University, under the academician Rao Zihe, one of China's most decorated structural biologists. Then she crossed the Pacific for a postdoc at Yale, studying the proteins that govern DNA damage, repair, and the slow slide toward cancer. Her name sits on 13 papers in the journals that scientists frame and hang on the wall - Nature, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Molecular Cell.
It would have been a perfectly respectable life. Solve a structure, publish it, solve the next one. Instead, in 2016, she walked away from the comfort of the academic ladder to do the much harder thing: convince investors, hire scientists better than her in their narrow lanes, and try to push a molecule all the way through a clinical trial. The biology she had studied from the outside - how DNA breaks, how it gets stitched back together - became the raw material she now wanted to engineer.
She did not do it alone. Cure Genetics was co-founded with Yanni Lin, the company's chief scientist, who holds a joint Ph.D. from Georgia Tech and Emory and a decade in gene editing. Around them Xu assembled the kind of bench that signals seriousness to anyone reading a pitch deck: a chief scientific officer with twenty-plus years and a stint as an executive vice president at Celularity, a clinical lead who has shepherded close to ten IND submissions through major pharma, a protein engineer who built the VELP platform from scratch.
The money followed the people. In August 2018, Cure Genetics closed a $17 million Series A led by Qiming Venture Partners - whose Nisa Leung pointed to the company's "outstanding technology platform and the top-class talents" as the reason for her confidence. CTS Capital and Ascendin Investment joined. Three years later, in December 2021, the company raised a $60 million Series B to push its cell therapy candidates for blood and solid tumors toward and through the clinic. Total funding now sits near $88.9 million, with Advantech Capital added to the cap table.