Ruth-Anne Pai, PhD
Immunologist, protein designer, and a person living with eosinophilic esophagitis. I build open, patient-first therapeutic science — and this project is what one week of it looks like when the patient and the scientist are the same person.
The citizen-scientist thesis
For many patients the path to an EoE diagnosis is long and indirect, and the treatment that follows is effective for many but fundamentally incomplete: PPIs, swallowed steroids, elimination diets, and/or dupilumab may reduce inflammation, but none is curative, all require indefinite adherence, and inflammation typically returns when treatment stops. Burden doesn't show up in a biopsy — chewing every bite an unusual number of times, drinking with every mouthful, a quiet, rational anxiety around eating out, and social anxiety and isolation. This is a disease that asks for constant, low-grade attention, meal after meal, for life.
That lived reality is not incidental to this work; it is its origin. When the immunologist and the patient are the same person, patient experience becomes a design input rather than a marketing note. It shapes which priorities lead, which endpoints matter, and how a community would be engaged.
What one week produced
With access to computational tools (folding and ESM-family models on GPU, public literature and omics, epitope prediction), clear immunological principles, and one week of focus, this project went from “here is a disease” to: novel epitopes identified from the EoE literature, structurally validated at atomic resolution; a multivalent tolerance platform grounded in published precedent; a complete preclinical development path with decision gates and budgets; and reusable software so anyone can do the same for their disease. To test that last claim, I pointed the same engine at a second, very different disease — esophageal cancer — and it produced a dual-arm target-and-binder program of its own. The next steps — laboratory validation and clinical translation — require a team. But the design is ready to be picked up, tested, and, if it holds, carried to patients.
Explore the project
Therapeutic Program Architect
A disease-agnostic drug-development specialist — for any community, any disease.
Manuscripts
Three preprints: pMHC-II tolerance, the CCL26 / POSTN effector axis, and a GUCY2C / DKK1 program for esophageal cancer.
Reach out
If this resonates with you — as a researcher, clinician, patient-advocate, funder, or biotech partner — I'd like to hear from you.
Work developed during the Built with Claude: Life Sciences Hackathon, 2026.