Episode: 85 - Daniel Chen on Building Multi-Target Drugs with Logic Gating

May 12, 2026 | When it comes to drug discovery, either you find a rare, clean target and everything clicks, or you spend a decade chasing biology that refuses to cooperate. Daniel Chen, M.D., Ph.D., founder and CEO of Synthetic Design Lab, makes the case for a different playbook: objective-driven protein engineering, where we start with the outcome and design biologics that can execute it with built-in logic. With host Andrew Bradbury, Chen unpacks the SYNTHBODY platform and what “multi-tier logic gating” means in real drug design. They dive into logic-gated antibody drug conjugates, where target summation can boost binding, internalization, trafficking, and payload delivery and where an additional AND gate can trigger multiplier functions that go beyond cytotoxic payloads.

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