This cartoon contrasts older ways of preventing protein activity with a newer degrader approach, which destroys and recycles the target. Image generated by Kimi AI on Aug. 19, 2026.
A team of Weill Cornell Medicine investigators has developed a computer model that will help scientists more efficiently develop protein-destroying therapies, a newer type of treatment that is particularly promising for cancer. The study was published July 13 in Nature Communications.
Most drugs use a small molecule to render disease-causing proteins harmless, but protein-degrader therapies aim to destroy the target protein altogether. Eliminating proteins, for example, those with cancer-causing mutations, or proteins produced in harmful excess quantities may offer advantages over disabling a protein. The new model could potentially shave years off the process of developing a new protein degrader therapy.
Dr. Olivier Elemento
“Targeted protein degradation leverages the machinery that already exists in your cells to eliminate unwanted proteins and redirects it to target a disease-causing protein,” said senior author Dr. Olivier Elemento, director of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine and a professor of systems and computational biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We developed a framework for determining how to most effectively design a degrader that would destroy the target protein.”