
Episode: 85 - Daniel Chen on Building Multi-Target Drugs with Logic Gating
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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.
Links from this episode:
Specifica
Synthetic Design Lab
Specifica
specifica.bioSynthetic Design Lab
syntheticdesignlab.com
- 0:00Welcome To The Chain
- 0:47Dan Chen’s Path To SynthBody
- 4:40Why Discovery Alone Doesn’t Scale
- 6:05Logic Gating For Protein Drugs
- 10:00Logic-Gated ADCs And Target Summation
- 18:02Safety By Tuning Affinity And Avidity
- 24:16Scale Effects And 3D Cell Geometry
- 30:40Design Plus Screening And Future AI
- 38:51Publishing The Platform And Startup Lessons