Two teams at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design published papers in Nature on October 14, 2026, reporting proteases designed from scratch with computational methods that hydrolyse the polypeptide backbone at chosen sequences, including sites in the human disease-associated proteins TDP-43, amyloid-β and serum amyloid A. The amide bonds linking amino acids along the peptide backbone are stable for hundreds of years in neutral aqueous solution because of the high energy…