Amy Kong

Amy Kong is Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Bionova Scientific, where she has led the company through rapid growth and expansion from its early days as a start-up CRO to its current state as a full-service CDMO.

Prior to co-founding Bionova in 2014, Amy held several scientific roles at leading biopharmaceutical firms including Boehringer Ingelheim, Amgen, and Abgenix. At Boehringer Ingelheim, Inc. and Amgen, Amy spent several years as a Senior Research Scientist where her responsibilities included managing the Upstream Process Development group, leading media development activities, process development, and process characterization (including characterizing the production bioreactor unit operation for a commercial process), process transfer and process improvements. In these roles, Amy prepared cell culture filings for the FDA QbD pilot program. She also evaluated the impact of critical raw materials on the productivity and product quality for a commercial process, resulting in a 30% improvement in titer and improved process consistency.

In a prior role at Abgenix, Amy specialized in commercial cell line development and vector performance improvement. She successfully developed high-producing cell lines for production and an IND filing using a DHFR-amplified system and also worked intensively with several CHO host cell lines, including CHO-DG44, DUXB-11, and CHO-K1. At Abgenix, Amy also developed protein expression vectors and evaluated them through small-scale cell culture. She successfully improved vector performance by optimizing the promoter, introns, and other vector-enhancing elements.

She started her career as a molecular biologist at Scios, Inc., where she focused on vector constructs, gene expression, and cloning.

Amy has published several peer-reviewed scientific articles and is the inventor of record for a U.S. patent involving mediators of signal transduction.

Amy earned her M.S. in Chemistry at the University of Minnesota and her B.S. in Biology at Fudan University, Shanghai, China.