A bio box for Jean Qiu
Updated: 10 hours ago
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2025 Business Leaders of the Year
Business Leaders of the Year: Following startup success, Qiu fills gaps in the life sciences market
Photo I Courtesy of Matt Wright
Jean Qiu, founder and CEO of Conigen Bioscience
In 2003, Jean Qiu founded Nexcelom Bioscience, a Lawrence-based company developing products to count and analyze cells in scientific research. After growing her company to 150 employees, she sold her business for $260 million in cash in 2021 to a company then-known as PerkinElmer.
Qiu stayed on with her acquirer as vice president of research and development to help facilitate the smooth transition of her employees, a team who has since launched multiple products in part thanks to her intermediary leadership.
After just shy of a year, Qiu and her husband, Peter Li, began to contemplate their next venture. It wasn’t long until they identified a gap in the market.
“We noticed some interesting phenomena in the startup scene,” said Qiu.
Entrepreneurs looking to start companies had deep scientific and technical knowledge, but they were not necessarily trained on the business side of running a company, she said. On the other hand, Qiu and Li had their management methodology locked in and knew they could bring that institutional knowledge to others just starting out.
Thus, the two became co-founders of Conifer Life Sciences Group, with Qiu acting as chief technology officer. Based in Worcester, Conifer partners with burgeoning startups, joining in as co-founders while providing seed funding, marketing, financial planning, human resources, and more.
Qiu excels at identifying market gaps, a skill largely fueled by the relationships she’s built with bench level and senior scientists at pharma companies around the country, said Eric Lev, previous board member of Nexcelom and partner at Boston-based healthcare investment fund Ampersand Capital Partners.
Simply put, people trust Qiu, and they allow her to come into their places of work, wanting to speak with her about their challenges and needs.
“She can operate on the ground level. She doesn't sit in the ivory tower. Jean will get out there, talk to people and scientists up to senior level people. She's not afraid of working hard and getting her hands dirty,” said Lev.
Not only is Qiu an innovator, she understands the cost of innovation too, he said. She has the understanding of what a solution will cost to provide and how much the market will be willing to pay for it.
Qiu has the unique skillset of both being extremely technically competent while being attuned to how products are and could be potentially used, said Lev.
“She's got the commercial understanding of what's going on in the market, what the pain points are, and then how to use technology and develop new solutions for those pain points,” he said.
Qiu has brought these skills to her most recent venture as co-founder and CEO of Conigen Bioscience, one of three companies co-founded by Conifer. Conigen works to create proteins that mimic human cells in order for scientists to use them in drug development.
“We do not directly discover drugs, but we are the enabling force. We provide the tools,” said Qiu.
Throughout her work from Nexcelom to Conigen, Qiu has used the same philosophy within her teams: Her job is to get people to do what they do to the best of their abilities. She knows building off a foundation of transparency and respect leads to bigger things.
“The market is fast moving, so we all have to contribute. Everybody has a part. So, that's how we organize, how we work,” said Qiu.
Qiu sets objectives for every quarter she and her team work toward together, keeping organized and in sync. With a business operation system and daily team huddles, weekly and quarterly meetings, Qiu makes sure people share their challenges and push each other to achieve the goals they’ve set for themselves.
“Everybody has a contribution. Everybody, every one of us, has what we do really well,” said Qiu.
Mica Kanner-Mascolo is a staff writer at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the healthcare and diversity, equity, and inclusion industries.
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