Chester Drum

Chester Drum, M.D. Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, a consultant cardiologist at the National University Hospital and director of the clinical trial innovation lab at TLGM, A*STAR. He is a Singapore permanent resident and currently maintains both internal medicine and cardiology board certifications in the US and Singapore. Dr. Drum received an M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was trained in medicine at the University of California, San Diego and as a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard Medical School), in Boston. He then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was director of translational medicine for the regulatory innovation group, MIT-NEWDIGS. While at MIT, he received the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists. In Singapore, he has been a recipient of a Clinician Scientist Award from the NMRC.

Dr. Drum’s current research centers on mass spectroscopy for precision medicine and clinical trial design. Specifically, the lab focuses on new forms of novel biomarker detection and multi-omics analyses of large patient cohorts. As a practicing consultant, Dr. Drum oversees trial design, patient recruitment, pre-analytical protocol development and both quantitative and high-resolution mass spectroscopy technique development and validation. A central thrust of the research program is to define critical unmet in established clinical workflows uniquely suited for LCMS technology. Dr. Drum currently oversees 7 active IRB protocols, three SMART innovation awards and is currently the primary investigator on a multimillion dollar, multi-institutional, 3,000 person clinical trial in Singapore. He has served as a contributing editor to Science Translational Medicine, is appointed as a domain expert for the Singapore Precision Medicine initiative, holds an active MOU with Agilent Corporation and currently sits on the Board of Directors, Asian Scientist Publishing.

RESEARCH INTEREST(S)

• Mass Spectrometry
• Biomarkers
• Clinical Trial
• Bioinformatics
• Proteomics

Education

• Bachelor of Arts (BA) The University of Chicago
• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) The University of Chicago
• Doctor of Medicine (MD) University of Chicago - The Pritzker School of Medicine

Awards & Grants

• 2016 SMART Innovation Award, SMART, Singapore (250,000 SGD)
• 2014 Saphire (2,100,000 SGD)
• 2014 SMART Innovation Award, SMART, Singapore (250,000 SGD)
• 2013 SMART Innovation Award, SMART, Singapore (250,000 SGD)
• 2012 Clinician Scientist Award, NMRC, Singapore (675,000 SGD)
• 2009 Burroughs Wellcome CAMS Award, USA (250,000 USD)
• 2008 Leadership Council in Cardiology Award, USA (50,000 USD)
• 2003 Harold Lamport Award for the Top Dissertation Submitted to the Biological Sciences
• University of Chicago, USA
• 2002 Award for Difficult Structure Determination of the Year, Gordon Conference, USA
• 1995 Summer Research Award, University of Chicago, USA
• 1994 Graduation with Honors, University of Chicago, USA

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

• Purnamawati, K., Ong, J. A. H., Deshpande, S., Tan, W. K. Y., Masurkar, N., Low, J. K., & Drum, C. L. (2018). The importance of sex stratification in autoimmune disease biomarker research: A systematic review. Frontiers in Immunology, 9(JUN).
• Tan, W. K. Y., Purnamawati, K., Pakkiri, L. S., Tan, S. H., Yang, X., Chan, M. Y., & Drum, C. L. (2018). Sources of variability in quantifying circulating thymosin beta-4: literature review and recommendations.. Expert Opin Biol Ther, 1-7.
• Patra, A., Ding, T., Hong, M., Richards, A. M., Wong, T. I., Zhou, X., & Drum, C. L. (2017). Using Extraordinary Optical Transmission to Quantify Cardiac Biomarkers in Human Serum. JOVE-JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS, (130), 7 pages.
• Deshpande, S., Masurkar, N. D., Girish, V. M., Desai, M., Chakraborty, G., Chan, J. M., & Drum, C. L. (2017). Thermostable exoshells fold and stabilize recombinant proteins. NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, 8, 8 pages.
• Ohlson, S., Kaur, J., Raida, M., Niss, U., Bengala, T., Drum, C. L., . . . Torres, A. R. (2017). Direct analysis – no sample preparation – of bioavailable cortisol in human plasma by weak affinity chromatography (WAC). JOURNAL OF CHROMATOGRAPHY B-ANALYTICAL TECHNOLOGIES IN THE BIOMEDICAL AND LIFE SCIENCES, 1061, 438-444.