Prompteina: AI designs proteins from plain-English prompts

A University of Washington team unveiled Prompteina, the first all-atom protein generation model that accepts design objectives in natural language. Nine de novo binders against a rare disease target bound in wet-lab tests, with the best reaching 107 nanomolar affinity.

• Model takes protein design goals as plain English text, like text-to-image
• 9 de novo binders validated in wet lab; best affinity 107 nanomolar
• Trained on 1.8M structures and 50M auto-generated captions
• Accepted at NeurIPS 2026; arXiv preprint posted October 9