SEEDS receives up to $51.7 million to combine AI and experiments on disease-linked disordered proteins
Published in Artificial Intelligence, Drugs development & discovery, Financial.
Publication date: October 12, 2026.
Georgetown University and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging announced on October 12 an ARPA-H award of up to US$51.7 million for SEEDS, a four-year research consortium investigating how intrinsically disordered proteins shift toward harmful states.
The project combines artificial intelligence, computational modelling and experimental measurements. Its initial focus includes tau, implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, and EWS::FLI1, associated with Ewing sarcoma. Unlike proteins with relatively stable structures, these proteins can adopt many shapes depending on their cellular surroundings.
Georgetown’s INTREPID team will investigate selected proteins in depth, while the Buck Institute’s SHIFT team will map disordered regions across a broader range of human proteins. Together, the teams aim to generate data for models that predict protein behaviour from both sequence and environment, with laboratory experiments testing those predictions.
Evidence limits: This is a research funding announcement under ARPA-H’s BIOGAMI program. Detecting or redirecting harmful protein changes is a project goal; the announcement does not demonstrate a validated diagnostic, effective treatment or prevention of Alzheimer’s disease or cancer.
Source: Georgetown University announcement, October 12, 2026.