Biography

Thomas Caulfield, Ph.D., has a research background in biochemistry, medicinal chemistry, biophysics, computational modeling and in silico drug studies. His long-term focus is on areas related to protein modeling and new drugs, such as structural studies of biomolecular targets, assessment of druggability, drug discovery (hit to lead through optimization) and de novo design.

Dr. Caulfield's laboratory is focused on investigating structure-function behavior of neurological disease targets, cancer biology targets and other metabolic targets using algorithmic strategies to study dynamics behaviors, protein-protein interactions and other complexes. The integrated interplay among molecular targets, cofactors and ligands is central to cellular pathways and can be examined at the level of gene, message transcript, protein or other macroscopic readouts. However, Dr. Caulfield's laboratory is primarily interested in studying the atomic level of detail that governs the interactions of the cellular components and integrating (data fusion) biological data to improve machine learning data sets for better predictions.

Dr. Caulfield collaborates with Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine (CIM) on variant of uncertain significance (VUS) research and the Precision Cancer Therapeutics (PCT) Program pipeline. A VUS is the result of a random genetic single nucleotide polymorphism (SNIP) and requires categorization as a pathogenic or benign polymorphism, which is a common outcome with genetic counseling. PCT is working on developing novel drug therapeutics to address important cancer therapies that are precision driven and complement other work within CIM.

Dr. Caulfield collaborates with several labs across multiple departments on Mayo Clinic's campuses in Jacksonville, Florida; Rochester, Minnesota; and Scottsdale, Arizona. Dr. Caulfield also has numerous collaborators at labs around the world that help foster discoveries in biochemistry, clinical genomics, computational biology, cancer biology and neuroscience.