We gave away one free de novo binder design campaign through a 48 hour open call. Twelve teams applied. Almost none of them wanted a drug. The targets ranged widely: a secreted chaperone, an autophagy scaffold, a bile acid transporter, a calcium activated chloride channel, an IgE Fc domain, a fish rhabdovirus glycoprotein. One group wanted a binder for free tryptophan, fused to HaloTag next to a rhodamine dye, so they could read intracellular tryptophan by fluorescence lifetime instead of destroying the sample by LC-MS. Most of these teams were not asking for an asset. They wanted a tool to ask a question they cannot currently ask. Block this interface and see what breaks. Stain this variant and not the wild type. We selected AXIN1, the scaffold at the centre of the beta-catenin destruction complex, and we are now working with the partner lab on binders that probe how that complex is regulated. Wnt is the most famous untargeted pathway in cancer. The first useful thing to build there is not a drug. It is a probe. Follow along this story to see what biology comes out of this