The pipeline accelerates exploration of disordered protein regions linked to cancer, neurodegeneration, and other diseases by offering a scalable design-and-test framework beyond traditional folded-protein approaches.

Beyond basic science, the research points to new sensors and signaling components tuned to external stressors, toxins, or cellular damage, broadening tools for biotech and medicine.

The research points to major applications in improving cancer immunotherapies and could extend to drought-resilience in yeast, climate-resilient crops, and biosensors for toxins or cellular damage.

We introduced GOOSE, a system that designs custom disordered proteins from a large library, letting researchers add or remove building blocks and test how these proteins affect cells.

Supported by a grant from Siteman Cancer Center, the work envisions advancing medical therapeutics and diagnostics through redesigned disordered regions in signaling.

In demonstrations, the team designed 2,300 synthetic proteins that respond to drought in yeast, with many outperforming the yeast’s natural proteins in stress resilience.

The Nature paper, building on nearly five years of work, aims to accelerate understanding of disordered protein regions, which make up about 70% of human proteins and are involved in health and disease.

The study highlights the potential to speed insights into protein disorder and to develop sensors and interventions for diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration.

A practical medical application discussed is reengineering disordered regions to optimize signaling in CAR-T cell therapies, potentially improving efficacy.

The work, published in Nature on July 29, 2026, was conducted by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Syracuse University with support from NSF, NIH, and other funders.

Funding comes from multiple NSF awards, NIH grants, the Human Frontiers in Science Program, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Syracuse University, with the Nature publication listing authors.

WashU Medicine researchers and collaborators developed GOOSE to study the function and disease relevance of proteins that lack stable 3D structure.