WEHI AI in Medical Research Seminar Series

Dr Ryan Cross

Senior Research Officer – The Brain Cancer Centre, Personalised Oncology division, WEHI

From Bench to Bytes: How a wet-lab researcher is trying to use AI to accelerate cell therapy discovery

Davis Auditorium

Join via TEAMS

Including Q&A session

Dr Ryan Cross is a mid-career researcher working at the forefront of translational immunotherapy and biologic drug discovery. With more than 10 years of experience in molecular biology, cell biology, and preclinical mouse models, his work has focused on developing next-generation CAR T cell therapies for paediatric brain cancer, spanning proteomic target discovery, synthetic protein engineering, and translational pipeline development, including leading the ACRF Immunotherapy Manufacturing Platform for Advanced Cell Therapies (IMPACT) clean room at WEHI.

Dr Cross’s current work focuses on integrating artificial intelligence into biologic and cell therapy development, including machine learning for target discovery, lab-in-the-loop synthetic antibody development, and predictive neural network models to guide therapeutic design. Through this work, Dr Cross is helping bridge wet-lab biology and AI to accelerate the development of next-generation therapies for children with brain cancer.

In this talk, Dr Cross will share his perspective as a wet-lab researcher integrating AI into biologic discovery, outlining what he is trying to build, what has been achieved to date, and the lessons learned so far. He will highlight practical insights into how AI can be most effectively deployed in experimental research, and how wet-lab studies can be designed to better support meaningful AI integration.

All welcome!