A Mammalian High-Throughput Screen for AI-Designed Peptide-Guided Protein Degraders

Abstract

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) offers a route to eliminate disease-driving proteins that remain inaccessible to conventional inhibitors. However, degrader discovery remains lowthroughput, labor-intensive, and dependent on randomized libraries or non-human display systems, limiting functional selection in mammalian cells. Here,we present a high-throughput, human cell-based platform for screening peptide-guided ubiquibodies (uAbs). These genetically encodable, doxycycline-inducible degraders fuse peptide guides generated by protein language models to the CHIPΔTPR E3 ligase domain, creating a modular, CRISPR-like system for programmable TPD. For each target, we introduce a pooled uAb library into the corresponding fluorescent reporter cell line, isolate cells with reduced target abundance by FACS, and recover enriched peptide guides by sequencing. For β-catenin, enriched uAbs reduced endogenous β-catenin abundance and Wnt signaling in DLD1 cells. GFAP-directed uAbs reduced endogenous GFAP abundance and cell viability in U251 glioblastoma cells, while EWS::FLI1-directed uAbs reduced FLI1 abundance, suppressed EWSAT1 expression, and increased apoptosis in Ewing sarcoma models. Finally, a screen using endogenously tagged GATA2 further identified uAbs that reduced GATA2 under native genomic regulation. Overall, our platform connects generative peptide design to functional mammalian selection and establishes a scalable strategy for CRISPR-like proteome perturbation.