Inflammation and Immunology Discovery: A Day in the Life of Pfizer Scientist Dr. Thomas Wynn

At Pfizer, bold science drives breakthroughs. Few embody this better than Thomas A. Wynn, Ph.D., Vice President of Discovery, Inflammation and Immunology at Pfizer, whose decades-long expertise bridges cutting-edge research with real-world impact.

Every day, Dr. Wynn’s work helps to advance Pfizer’s purpose to deliver breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. From his previous work leading research teams at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to his present-day work advancing Pfizer’s research and development, his day reflects the relentless curiosity and collaboration driving Pfizer’s goal of delivering treatment breakthroughs. Dive into a day at Pfizer with Dr. Wynn below:

Investor Insights: Tell me about your role at Pfizer.

Dr. Thomas Wynn: I’m Tom Wynn, Vice President of Discovery in Pfizer’s Inflammation and Immunology Research Unit, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My team conducts basic science research on the immune system with the primary goal of discovering new therapeutic approaches that may help advance Pfizer’s portfolio. We focus on chronic inflammatory, fibrotic, and autoimmune diseases across gastroenterology, dermatology, rheumatology, and neuroinflammation.

Investor Insights: You’ve had a fascinating career trajectory. You were a scientist at the NIH for over 25 years before joining Pfizer. Can you tell us about your background and what led you to Pfizer?

Dr. Thomas Wynn: I spent over 25 years at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, leading a team of about 15 scientists who focused their research on chronic inflammatory diseases, specifically in the liver, lung, and intestine. We investigated diseases that lead to fibrosis, allergic asthma, and the role of the immune system in driving disease.

A recurring theme in my work at NIH was understanding key pathways that drive disease, and oftentimes the redundant pathways that may impair the efficacy of treatment—when one pathway is blocked, backup systems can activate and potentially limit the effectiveness of treatments.

After a long career of elucidating disease pathways at the NIH, I joined Pfizer because I wanted to translate my knowledge into discovering potential treatments. As a basic scientist at the NIH, it was challenging to develop therapeutics without access to research teams that have the unique skills needed to develop complex antibodies, small molecules, and other disease modifying therapeutics that are at the core of drug development. While at the NIH, I had collaborated with biotech and pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, and when Dr. Mike Vincent became the Chief Scientific Officer of the Inflammation and Immunology Research Unit, he invited me to join his team and lead Discovery. It was an incredible opportunity to continue the type of science I had been doing at the NIH but with access to a full suite of drug development resources—antibody engineers, chemists, and drug safety teams, among many others.

Investor Insights: Can you walk us through a typical day in your life at Pfizer? What do you find most exciting or fulfilling about your work?

Dr. Thomas Wynn: Here at Pfizer, I’d bucket my work across three focus areas:

1. Building a strong team: We need to understand the science of disease to build the most effective medicines. I devote a lot of effort to building a team of mission-focused, exceptional scientists who strive to identify the best therapeutic targets and translate them into potential medicines.
2. Communication and strategy: In the inflammation and immunology space, many diseases need better treatments. My job involves identifying where we have the potential to make the biggest impact—where are our strengths, what diseases have the most significant unmet medical need, where we could be most effective, etc.—and aligning our team on that mission. We hold regular strategy sessions to refine our approach and ensure everyone is on the same page—and continuously refine our priorities and adapt our approach based on new insights and opportunities.
3. External collaboration: To stay abreast of emerging science in the field, a significant portion of my time is spent evaluating external opportunities and building our development strategy. I work closely with the business development team, the discovery network team, Pfizer Ignite, and Pfizer Ventures to identify potential new technologies, external assets, and opportunities from biotech startups. Establishing external collaborations allow us to further expand our expertise and fill any technology gaps as we strive to accelerate innovation in areas where Pfizer has the potential to add substantial value.

Investor Insights: Within Pfizer’s Immunology and Inflammation pipeline, multispecific antibodies seem to be a major area of investment and attention. Can you tell us about the potential of this platform as a treatment for patients with immune and inflammatory conditions?

Dr. Thomas Wynn: Pfizer’s multispecific antibody platform is incredibly exciting—it was one of the things that drew me to join Pfizer. Pfizer’s BioMedicine Design team has worked for many years on advancing the ability to design and develop multi-functional antibodies that could allow a single molecule to target two, three, or even four targets simultaneously. I learned of Pfizer’s work while I was at the NIH, and it was mind-blowing to me.

Multispecific antibodies have the potential to address the understanding we were gaining while I was at NIH, that when you block one pathway, backup mechanisms can activate and reduce the efficacy of a therapeutic. Over the past seven years, Pfizer has devoted a lot of resources in developing and refining this technology, and now Pfizer has several multispecific antibodies in clinical trials and anticipates bringing forward more in the future. This is a major step in potentially moving the needle to treat complex inflammatory diseases with improved efficacy and strong safety profiles.

Investor Insights: How are emerging technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) being applied to the research and development of multispecific antibodies?

Dr. Thomas Wynn: Designing multispecific antibodies is a complex process and there are many variables involved that increase the chance of something not working. Pfizer has begun to integrate AI and machine learning to help optimize antibody development and increase the probability of success once these novel therapeutics reach the clinic. Using AI and machine learning is valuable, in that, it helps the team to engineer these antibodies and compliments the team’s development efforts. AI/ML is also helping to increase our understanding of diseases that might be best treated with a multispecific antibody approach.

Investor Insights: What are some of the obstacles you’re trying to overcome in your research today? 

Dr. Thomas Wynn: In developing multispecific antibodies—where we’re tasked with balancing a high level of complexity with strong efficacy hopes—one of the biggest challenges is developing the best preclinical models to evaluate multispecific antibodies. With so many potential combinations to target each disease, inflammatory pathways, and targets for those diseases, we need robust systems to determine which combinations and therapeutics have the best chance of success in the lab, before advancing them into clinical development.

Our team spends a lot of time considering what are the best lab tests for immune pathways that are targeted with our multispecific antibodies, so that we fully understand their unique roles in disease before deciding which targets go into the final design. These preclinical models help us understand core pathways and targets, so we have the potential to design the most effective disease modifying therapeutics.

Another key challenge centers around our work to help ensure the antibodies maintain efficacy without introducing issues like anti-drug responses. We aim to create efficacious antibodies that retain their efficacy over time. Thanks to nearly a decade of work by Pfizer’s BioMedicine Design team, multispecific antibodies have the potential to help us improve how we treat diseases.

Investor Insights: What do you see as the future for this space in terms of how it could affect patients and the way they are treated?

Dr. Thomas Wynn: I have two family members with Crohn’s disease, so I’ve seen firsthand how challenging chronic inflammatory diseases can be for patients. While existing treatments help some patients, they often fall short for others. I’m incredibly optimistic about what multispecific antibodies can potentially achieve. By simultaneously targeting the core pathways driving disease, we have potential to significantly improve treatment outcomes for patients. It’s an exciting time, and I believe we’re on the cusp of breakthroughs that could make a meaningful and lasting difference in patients’ lives.

Forward-looking statements included herein are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. We encourage you to read our reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including the sections captioned “Risk Factors” and “Forward Looking Information and Factors that May Affect Future Results,” for a description of such substantial risks and uncertainties. These reports are available at pfizer.com and the SEC’s website.