Logic gate proteins
Reading: Scalable synthetic biology revolutionizes targeted therapy with logic-gate proteins, News Medical, 10 October 2025.
This is right up my street: building up a logic gate in a protein.
It goes something like this. You have some therapeutic payload (a drug, say), connected (tethered) to other molecules that are designed to be cut. While the tethers are there, the payload is physically immobilised.
The payload is only released if a logic condition is satisfied. That condition is satisfied when the tethers interact with what's around them and break off. That's likely enzymes that "cut" the tether.
For example, if we linked a therapeutic cargo to a material via two degradable groups connected in series - that is, each after the other - it would be released if either group was degraded, acting as an OR gate. When the degradable groups were instead connected in parallel - that is, each on a different half of a cycle - both groups had to be degraded for cargo release, functioning as an AND gate. Excitingly, by combining these basic gates we could readily create advanced logical circuits.
So you programme the logic according to the environment you want to get to. How cool is that?
In the paper they can implement many different logical outputs using AND and OR, and chain conditions together. There's no NOT, but it's unclear how that would be used in this context.
So:
The dream is to be able to pick any arbitrary location inside of the body - down to individual cells - and program a material to go and act there
They believe "the first practical applications are likely to be cancer treatments".