Meet the Fellows - Deborah Thomas

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗠𝗲𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 

When you ask a scientist about the moment they fell in love with science, you might expect a mundane answer. For Deborah, “Debbie”, it was anything but — it was an aesthetic awakening. During her undergrad time at the Stawikowski Lab at Florida Atlantic University, she took a course on protein structures and was captivated by the sheer beauty of proteins: their intricate crystal structures, the elegant way inhibitors slot perfectly into place. That sense of wonder led her to an interest in peptides, and how peptides can be used to make medicines.  

Today she is a 6th year PhD student at the University of Chicago, in the Moellering lab, using structure-based design to chemically modify peptide drugs and improve their pharmacological performance in cancer treatment. Several of the targets of focus have no FDA approved drugs, or develop drug resistance easily and require alternate treatments or intolerable chemotherapy options.  

What attracts Debbie to peptides are their practicality, efficiency and versatility. Peptide synthesis can be very reproducible once it's optimized. They’re versatile and tunable in their potential to be less immunogenic, as another example. But their breadth of application in both diagnostics and therapeutics is what excites her about the future of peptides.  

In her future, she hopes to someday marry the chemistry to the medicine and be involved in clinical trials for a new drug, or perhaps use her passion and diverse skill set to work on the business side to help make breakthrough discoveries feasible.