Bind Research is joining the buzzing Cambridge scene!
We have opened a satellite lab within the Milner Bio-Incubator at the Milner Therapeutics Institute in Cambridge.
The Milner was set up to bridge academia and industry in drug discovery, bringing together its own research programme in functional genomics and target discovery with a consortium of pharma partners and a community of early-stage companies.
So it feels like the perfect place for Bind, a non-profit Focused Research Organisation, to access additional technical capabilities, extending the range of IDP drug discovery work we can run alongside our London operations.
We’re looking forward to being part of the eco-system!
Got an IDP target? We’d love to hear from you.
Intrinsically disordered proteins are implicated in some of the most important and least-treated diseases in human health, but for a long time the tools to drug them simply didn’t exist. At Bind, we’re building those tools, and we want to put them to work on the targets that matter most.
That’s why we’ve launched our Submit an IDP Target initiative. Whether you’re an academic researcher with a target you’ve been unable to pursue through conventional approaches, a clinician who sees an unmet need, a patient foundation with a disease focus, or a company looking for a collaborative partner, we want to hear from you.
There’s no fixed template for what a good submission looks like. If you have a disordered protein you believe is therapeutically relevant or scientifically intriguing, whether in oncology, neurodegeneration, infectious disease or another area, we’re open to a conversation. We’ll review submissions and explore where there’s potential for collaboration using Bind’s screening and characterisation capabilities.
On 19 March 2026, Bind Research officially launched to an audience of more than 300 scientists, investors, policymakers, clinicians and technologists at One Triton Square, London. The event was hosted by VentureCafé London, sponsored by ARIA.
The evening featured two keynote speakers. Professor Sheena Radford OBE FRS FMedSci spoke about why intrinsically disordered proteins remain one of the most fascinating and challenging frontiers in biology. These are proteins that defy the classical structure-function paradigm: they don’t fold into fixed shapes, yet they are central to some of the most important processes in human disease. The tools, she noted, are finally catching up with the biology.
Dr Dave Smith FIET FRAeS, UK National Technology Advisor, made a compelling case for why the Focused Research Organisation model matters, not just for science but for the UK’s ability to translate deep research into real-world impact. FROs exist to tackle problems that are too hard, too risky and too long-term for conventional funding structures and that is precisely why Bind exists.
The breadth of conversation in the room, spanning disciplines and sectors, reflected the growing recognition that IDPs represent a genuine and increasingly tractable therapeutic opportunity and the team at Bind would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who showed up and participated in the lively discussions.
30% of the human proteome is intrinsically disordered. Almost none of it is considered druggable. That is one of the largest unmet opportunities in medicine. Bind has recently published two papers setting out exactly why disordered proteins have resisted drug discovery for so long.
The barriers are real: no stable binding pockets, no scalable measurement tools, and no training data for AI-driven drug discovery. Bind Research exists to close all three gaps simultaneously.
Our white paper lays out how we are building the organisational infrastructure, measurement platforms and open datasets to enable drug discovery for IDPs.
Our perspective article in Current Opinion in Structural Biology sets out the scientific case in further detail. The field has been asking whether IDPs can be made widely druggable. We believe the answer is ‘YES!’, and our mission is to provide the tools and platforms to enable scientists across the world to prove it.
None of this would be possible without the vision and support of our funders and collaborators, to whom we say a huge thank-you!
White paper: https://zenodo.org/records/19057074
Current Opinion article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959440X26000187
