Guiding treatments and cures for neurodegenerative diseases

Stress comes in many forms--for us, a hard day of work, and for our cells, unexpected changes in their environment, from temperature swings to injury to infection. Dr. Allan Drummond, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, studies how cells respond to stress at the molecular level. In particular, he studies a largely unexplored process by which stress triggers an assembly of massive, complex aggregates inside the cell, much as a traumatic event in human affairs might trigger the assembly of large crowds of people in a city. Many neurodegenerative diseases involve similar massive aggregates, and Dr. Drummond’s work is likely to be an important model for understanding and ultimately treating and preventing these diseases.

By figuring out how cells respond to stress, Dr. Drummond and his team hope to control and exploit cells’ molecular tools for human purposes. Thus, he and his team are able to develop cheap, nontoxic, robust, and functional molecular tools that can control molecules and chemical reactions in novel ways. Specifically, he and his team are using self-assembling molecules to control the locations of reactants in chemical reactions, allowing them to do things, like protein purification, that until now required expensive equipment. Therefore, his research is likely to transform how science is done and who can do it! Secondly, Dr. Drummond’s work on understanding how cells sense and respond to stress aims to provide a way to control those same cellular processes. This is a critical step towards developing preventions, therapies, and perhaps even cures for neurodegeneration.

Current research includes:

  • Stressed Cells: All life responds to changes in the environment, where temperature changes are among the most primal of stressors. Cells from baker’s yeast to humans have evolved to respond to heat stress in consistent ways down to the molecular level. Dr. Drummond and his team are studying new ways in which cells regulate and remodel themselves when confronted with stress. Studying stress under extremely controlled conditions offers an inexpensive, high-precision way to address long-standing questions about how cells work.

  • Massive Assembly: Dr. Drummond is studying a process that has increasingly become recognized as critically important to transcription and translation. His team’s work illuminates a novel cellular regulatory system based on massive molecular assembly that allows cells to react to heat and other stresses, a new layer of biology with profound implications for how cells function across the tree of life.

  • Neurodegenerative Diseases: Dr. Drummond’s research is shedding light upon the molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases. Protein aggregation in diseased brains is increasingly recognized to result from normal aggregation processes gone awry. His research illuminates how these normal processes work and how they can be altered at the molecular level.

After college, where Dr. Drummond trained as a mechanical engineer, he joined a software startup, Trilogy, in Austin, Texas as a programmer and employee #80. He spent a few years on the road doing technical sales, then returned to headquarters to be a management trainee at Trilogy University, where their CEO-led rolling three-month boot camps for new employees and new managers. He then took charge of Trilogy University, which he ran for several years, as Trilogy grew to more than a thousand employees. By 2002, Dr. Drummond led training, leadership development, and internal communications as an HR director.

But at night, Dr. Drummond found himself going home and reading textbooks on quantitative biology. It started with curious reading of challenging books on ethics (particularly by Peter Singer) and the stories of Richard Feynman, a scientist who seemed to be doing the only job he could dream of, at the highest level---and for the benefit of all, whether he cared or not. Like so many others, Dr. Drummond found his stories thrilling and inspiring. More deeply, he slowly became convinced that contributing to science was his calling.

After more than a year of filling notebooks with math and intellectual struggles each night, he decided he should pursue graduate studies. Despite having no formal research experience, he applied to graduate schools. All of them rejected him. But Dr. Drummond pled his unusual case at Caltech, and, to his surprise, they reversed their decision and admitted him. Four years later, he received the Caltech doctoral thesis prize and accepted an independent fellowship at Harvard.

Today, Dr. Drummond is a professor of biochemistry, a scientist shaped by industry, with a focus on basic research. He studies new ways in which cells sense and respond to their environment at the molecular level. His goal is to push the frontier of knowledge in interesting directions, knowing that the most useful findings remain difficult or impossible to predict.

Aside from research, Dr. Drummond enjoys drawing, swimming, a cappella singing, and 3D printing. He is also a novice dressage rider.

Website: http://drummondlab.org

Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, Pew Charitable Trusts

Sloan Research Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Pritzker Scholar, University of Chicago

Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize (thesis prize, all fields), California Institute of Technology

Demetriades-Tzafka Prize in Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology