{"id":223167,"date":"2025-10-09T11:13:55","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T16:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/programmable-proteins-use-logic-to-improve-targeted-drug-delivery"},"modified":"2025-10-09T11:13:55","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T16:13:55","slug":"programmable-proteins-use-logic-to-improve-targeted-drug-delivery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/programmable-proteins-use-logic-to-improve-targeted-drug-delivery","title":{"rendered":"Programmable proteins use logic to improve targeted drug delivery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/programmable-proteins-use-logic-to-improve-targeted-drug-delivery2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Targeted drug delivery is a powerful and promising area of medicine. Therapies that pinpoint the exact areas of the body where they\u2019re needed\u2014and nowhere they\u2019re not\u2014can reduce the medicine dosage and avoid potentially harmful off-target effects elsewhere in the body. A targeted immunotherapy, for example, might seek out cancerous tissues and activate immune cells to fight the disease only in those tissues.<\/p>\n<p>The tricky part is making a therapy truly \u201csmart,\u201d where the medicine can move freely through the body and decide which areas to target.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the University of Washington have taken a significant step toward that goal by designing proteins with autonomous decision-making capabilities. In a proof-of-principles study published in <i>Nature Chemical Biology<\/i>, researchers demonstrated that by adding smart tail structures to <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/therapeutic+proteins\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">therapeutic proteins<\/a>, they could control the proteins\u2019 localization based on the presence of specific environmental cues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Targeted drug delivery is a powerful and promising area of medicine. Therapies that pinpoint the exact areas of the body where they\u2019re needed\u2014and nowhere they\u2019re not\u2014can reduce the medicine dosage and avoid potentially harmful off-target effects elsewhere in the body. A targeted immunotherapy, for example, might seek out cancerous tissues and activate immune cells to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}