Seminar | Restoring Cell Health and Reversing Disease by Cellular Rejuvenation.

2026-03-28

Weisheng Chen

On March 26, 2026, Dr. Weisheng Chen, Founder and CEO of Leveragen, presented “Development of an Engineered Mouse Platform for Single-Domain Heavy-Chain Antibodies.” The talk focused on Leveragen’s innovative Singularity platform designed to streamline the discovery of fully human single-domain antibodies (nanobodies).

Dr. Chen highlighted the advantages of nanobodies—such as their 15KD size and modularity—while addressing the limitations of traditional camelid-derived methods. He detailed the platform’s core technology: a 1.0MB in situ replacement of the mouse VDJH locus with the complete human repertoire. By strategically deleting the CH1 domain, the Singularity platform enables the in vivo expression of high-affinity, heavy-chain-only antibodies (HcAbs). This approach enables efficient generation of therapeutic leads against complex targets like GPCRs without additional humanization.

The seminar concluded by demonstrating how the platform provides a natural immune selection environment that significantly shortens drug development timelines. By delivering fully human functional antibodies directly, Leveragen aims to provide a robust technological foundation for next-generation biotherapeutics and multi-specific antibody engineering.

About the speaker

Weisheng Chen, PhD, is the Founder, CEO, and Scientific Director of Leveragen. A molecular geneticist and entrepreneur, Dr. Chen earned his PhD from the University of Michigan and conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard and Columbia. Before founding Leveragen in 2017 to build the next-generation in vivo antibody discovery platforms, he was a Founding Scientist at Kallyope, Inc. Under his leadership, the Boston-based firm has become a pioneer in advanced genetic engineering and translational biotechnology.