Lijia Ma

Ma Lijia is a genomics researcher and biotech founder at the intersection of AI and gene editing. She heads the functional genomics and gene therapy lab at Westlake University (a PI in its School of Life Sciences), holds a PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Beijing Institute of Genomics, did postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago's Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology, and earlier ran large-scale genomics projects at BGI . In February 2021 she co-founded Westlake Genetech (西湖云谷智药), an AI-enabled gene-editing therapeutics company — it raised a tens-of-millions RMB angel round that May . More recently, per Gaorong Ventures coverage, the company has been applying deep-learning models to the AAV delivery problem and moving into in vivo CAR-T, which that November 2025 piece framed as gene therapy's moment arriving in China . She has also presented the company's AI-for-Science work at Gaorong's generative-AI events .