AI Redesigned 672 Antibodies to Work Inside Brain Cells, Aiming at Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
Normal antibodies are too large to get inside a cell, which rules them out against disease-causing proteins that never leave the cytoplasm — a real problem for neurodegenerative disease, where a lot of the damage happens intracellularly. A University of Essex team used AI to redesign 672 existing antibodies into "intrabodies," small enough to fold correctly and function inside human cells, targeting proteins implicated in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and motor neurone disease. Published in Nature Communications. It's a platform result, not a treatment — no human dosing data exists yet — but combined with gene-therapy delivery methods, it's a real answer to a targeting problem that's mostly kept intracellular disease proteins out of reach.
Read at University of Essex / Nature Communications