Adaptyv Bio

Our last challenge in the Anthropic x Adaptyv Protein Design Competition is about immunotherapy, one of the most important ways of treating cancer. Immunotherapy helps the immune system attack cancer cells, but distinguishing them from healthy cells isn't always easy. In some cancers, the difference can be as subtle as a single amino acid in a small protein fragment. That's the case with KRAS, a protein that works like a growth switch in our cells. In many cancers, a mutation leaves the switch stuck on, and the cell keeps multiplying itself and grows into a tumor. In Challenge 5, you need to design a binder that sticks to the mutated piece of KRAS, but not to the healthy version, so that the immune system can find and attack the cancer cells. The deadline to submit protein designs for this challenge is November 8. Then, we'll pick the best designs and test them in our lab.

We're excited to share results from our latest wet lab campaign with @AnthropicAI and @citrini. Claude designed novel proteins to neutralize scorpion toxins and we tested 211 of these protein designs in our automated wet lab. 17 of them showed binding to the toxins in our experiments, with all data now available on @proteinbase. This is a great example of what we're building towards: A world where anyone can run drug discovery campaigns on our automated wet lab.

Challenge 4 of the Anthropic × Adaptyv Protein Design Competition on @proteinbase is open: design a pH-sensitive protein to help shuttle drugs into the brain. TfR1 is a receptor protein that brings iron-loaded transferrin into cells. It is highly expressed in the blood-brain barrier and drug developers can use this receptor to get drugs to pass the blood-brain barrier. The drug is fused to a binder to TfR1, which makes cells absorb the protein complex. If the binder is pH-sensitive it will release from the receptor inside the endosome and then exit the cells on the brain-facing side to deliver the therapeutic into the brain. In this challenge, the goal is to make a pH-sensitive binder to TfR1 that targets precisely the right region on the receptor in order to allow absorption into the cell.

Challenge 3 of the Anthropic × Adaptyv Protein Design Competition is open. You have to design a protein that switches on GLP1R, the receptor that semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and tirzepatide act on in type 2 diabetes and obesity.

In rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease, immune cells in the joint or gut wall produce TNF-α continuously. TNF-α is active as a homotrimer, with three identical chains forming one complex. Each of its three receptor-binding sites sits in the groove between two neighbouring chains. The site only exists in the assembled trimer, not on a single chain. One trimer then pulls three receptors together on the cell surface, and that clustering switches on inflammatory genes inside the cell. They produce cytokines and draw immune cells drawn into the tissue which erodes the tissue. Adalimumab and infliximab block the receptor sites to stop it.