Texas A&M Health Institute researchers unveiled CODS, an AI-designed, caffeine-activated protein dissociation system intended to give engineered cells a controllable “pause” mechanism. Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the approach repurposes a caffeine-responsive proximity module into a ligand-dependent dissociation platform and demonstrates tunable control across gene circuits, pyroptosis pathway re-wiring, and conditional dampening of CAR T cell activity without eliminating the cells.