Senior Vice President, Discovery Systems, OmniAb
Bob Chen, Ph.D., is senior vice president of discovery systems at OmniAb, where he leads the development and commercialization of innovative tools for therapeutic antibody discovery. His work sits at the intersection of biology, engineering, artificial intelligence and software to help partners find therapeutic antibodies faster, bringing better medicines to patients sooner.
Dr. Chen has launched several of OmniAb’s core technologies, including xPloration® and OmniDeep™. Bob has shepherded xPloration through nearly every stage of its life. The high-throughput single B-cell screening platform began as a prototype in a Stanford University laboratory. Bob co-founded xCella Biosciences to commercialize it alongside Jennifer Cochran, Ph.D., served as chief technology officer, and carried the technology through its 2020 acquisition and into OmniAb. xPloration is a high-throughput single B-cell screening platform that applies machine learning and computer vision AI to process millions of single B-cells and recover thousands of antibody variants within hours, compared with the weeks traditional methods can require. In 2025, Bob led the launch of the xPloration Partner Access Program at the 21st Annual PEGS Boston Summit, where it was voted “Best of Show”. xPloration is now in partners’ laboratories in the USA and in Europe, accelerating discovery of therapeutic antibodies.
He also introduced OmniDeep, OmniAb’s suite of in silico tools for therapeutic discovery and optimization, at PEGS Boston in 2023. Bob oversees the company’s screening, molecular biology and computational immunology teams across sites in California, Arizona, and North Carolina. He holds more than 30 issued or allowed patents across seven families spanning protein engineering, single-cell screening assays and life science tools.
Bob has a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering and biology from MIT and a doctorate in bioengineering from Stanford University, where he held both a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Stanford Graduate Fellowship.
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