Chris Wassif leads the physical build of the "lab of the future" at AstraZeneca, overseeing the automation of high-throughput platforms used to produce antibodies, assess whether they can be successfully manufactured as medicines, and test how they function. This work spans sites in Boston and Gaithersburg.

Chris is a molecular biologist and biotechnology leader with more than 30 years of experience across rare diseases, drug discovery, and antibody research. Antibodies are complex protein molecules that can be engineered into medicines. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Oxford, through the NIH-Oxford Scholars Program, a joint initiative between the US National Institutes of Health and the University of Oxford. He has since led research teams at both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and AstraZeneca.

At the NIH, Chris established the first Next-Generation Sequencing Core Facility at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a resource that allows scientists to read genetic information at very large scale. He also led programmes in biomarker discovery, which identifies biological signals that have the potential to indicate disease or predict response to treatment, and high-throughput drug screening, which uses automation to test many potential drug candidates rapidly.

His work has resulted in more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, and he is passionate about combining biology, automation, and informatics to accelerate scientific discovery.