PTC Therapeutics Computer-Aided Drug Design

PTC was my first job after college. I started as part of the Fellowship program as a Machine Learning Engineering Fellow on the (at the time) Computational Chemistry team. The fellowship program was supposed to be for a whole year, but after six months, I was in talks about signing on as an Associate Scientist, and within nine months, I was officially part of the (rebranded) Computer-Aided Drug Design team, under the management of Anthony Mazzotti, with my teammates Carlos Borca and Joseph O’Brien.

The four of us worked together, proposing ideas, developing and testing proof-of-concepts, running calculations, and constructing various tools to act as a support for the other chemists in the Chemistry department at PTC.

Though I can’t go into specifics about the projects we worked on, the gist is: I developed data processing and ML model pipelining tools (as well as actual ML models) to aid in the parametric optimization of chemical substructures for potential drug candidates.

In addition, I was put on an interdisciplinary team, inclusive of bioinformaticians, biologists, chemists, and IT specialists. This team focused on one of the methodologies PTC was using to test the biological effect of chemical compounds. As part of this team, I workshopped computational methods to increase the visibility of experimental data through changes to negative experimental controls and statisitical parameter optimization.

Throughout my time at PTC, I learned a lot about the drug development process, medicinal chemistry, and the real-world effect of non-deterministic experimental data on ML/AI models. It was a time of great professional growth.

That said, the job wouldn’t have been the same without my amazing team who encouraged me, mentored me, and challenged me throughout my seventeen months at PTC before our team was disbanded as part of a reduction in force at the company.