Researchers at the University of Washington reported engineering proteins that perform Boolean logic in biological environments to control therapeutic localization and release. Published in Nature Chemical Biology, the work from Cole DeForest’s lab describes self‑folding “smart tails” that respond to enzyme, pH, or other disease cues and implement AND/OR/YES gating to restrict payload activation. The team also developed a recombinant production pipeline to scale these programmable proteins from design to product in weeks instead of months. The authors emphasize the platform’s potential to reduce off‑target toxicity by requiring multiple local signals for activation; DeForest framed the advance as both a manufacturing and functional inflection point for modular, disease‑honing biologics.