Thomas Fryer

Thomas Fryer is an MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellow whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach using directed evolution techniques usually applied to therapeutic protein discovery to solve complex problems. His doctoral research involved building an ultra-high throughput fully in vitro therapeutic protein phenotypic screening platform using droplet-based microfluidics, with the aim of significantly expediting drug discovery by enabling relevant cellular assays to be carried out far earlier in the discovery phase. As a postdoctoral fellow, he seeks to establish a fully automated, multiplexed, and rapid technology platform that could autonomously optimize proteins across multiple parameters through a combination of lab robotics, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence. His goal is to address issues of time, cost, instability, and animal use that surround binding protein discovery, particularly in the context of therapeutics and disease areas where antibody-based therapies are often prohibitively expensive. Thomas’s research has the potential to advance binder discovery to the point it becomes a routine, cheap, and rapid procedure requiring little to no human input or animal use, akin to the rapid and automated DNA synthesis tools we have today.