AI is making protein design faster and more accessible. Yet every candidate must still be produced in the lab before it can enter functional validation and downstream testing. As design throughput grows, protein expression, purification, and the screening needed to optimize them are becoming the rate-limiting steps. What if every protein designer could access wet-lab testing?

Ailurus has launched PandaPure Cloud, its high-throughput protein expression and purification cloud service, through a collaboration with Shenzhen Synthetic Biology Infrastructure (hereinafter referred to as “Synthetic Biology Infrastructure”), and announced the first PandaPure Cloud beta. During the first beta, users pay only a fee based on each target’s CDS length; cloning into three standard PandaPure vectors and subsequent expression and small-scale purification testing are provided at no additional charge.

LONDON, August 5, 2026 — At the Synbiopunk 2026 Global Biodeveloper Unconference on July 25, Ailurus and Synthetic Biology Infrastructure jointly announced that PandaPure, a protein-purification platform based on the synthetic RNA organelle technology TEARS, had been integrated into the Infrastructure’s automated platform. Together, Ailurus and Synthetic Biology Infrastructure have launched PandaPure Cloud, a cloud-lab Protein Production Screen service, and opened beta testing to help academic and industrial researchers accelerate protein design and engineering, with the capability to support downstream scale-up and testing.

01AI is accelerating protein design; experimental validation must keep pace

Since the release of AlphaFold 2, a wide range of AI tools for protein-structure prediction and sequence design have emerged. These tools accelerate the generation of candidate sequences and lower the barrier to protein discovery and design, enabling more researchers to discover proteins computationally and design functional proteins from scratch.

But in silico design is not the endpoint. Each protein candidate still needs to be made in the physical world.

High-throughput experimentation is valuable not only because it processes more samples at once, but because it produces comparable results for a set of candidates under the same conditions. Those results help R&D teams decide which targets should move into further testing, optimization, and scale-up. Yet conventional protein expression and purification technologies do not provide a streamlined path from high-throughput discovery to subsequent development. As the candidate set grows from a few to dozens or even hundreds, experimental validation can become a severe R&D bottleneck.

02A four-day deployment of the automated PandaPure workflow at Synthetic Biology Infrastructure

PandaPure, a proprietary technology developed by Ailurus based on the synthetic RNA organelle technology TEARS, replaces column-based purification with a cell-programming workflow. Host cells assemble synthetic organelles that capture and enrich tagged target proteins in vivo; a separation and autocatalytic tag-cleavage step then releases the proteins in tag-free form. The resulting workflow replaces conventional expression, purification, and tag-removal operations with an automation-native procedure without traditional consumables. Recovered samples have been used for downstream functional testing, crystallization, and structure determination.

Synthetic Biology Infrastructure has built high-throughput automated functional islands covering strain construction, small-volume culture and fermentation, protein expression, and purification analysis. Together, these islands form an automated technical system spanning the full Design–Build–Test–Learn (DBTL) workflow. Combining automated laboratory systems, standardized experimental workflows, and a digital management platform, the facility can process up to 1 million protein-expression and purification samples annually, providing an ideal execution environment for PandaPure technology.

Up to 1 million protein-expression and purification samples processed annually.

40 functional islands connect automated experiments across the DBTL workflow.

Four days to bring the automated PandaPure workflow online.

In this collaboration, Ailurus provided the underlying PandaPure technology and materials, while Synthetic Biology Infrastructure adapted the workflow for automation and executed the experiments. The joint team brought PandaPure online at the biofoundry in just four days, including a water run, colony picking, cultivation, induced expression, and all downstream processing following the PandaPure protocol.

With PandaPure deployed at Synthetic Biology Infrastructure, PandaPure Cloud will let users submit batches of candidate proteins for standardized, high-throughput protein-production screening. Protein designers and developers can therefore obtain real wet-lab results without setting up their own laboratory. These results provide an initial basis for downstream functional characterization, further screening, and optimization.

03PandaPure Cloud First Beta: Pricing from US$0.09/bp

Ailurus operates PandaPure Cloud, and Synthetic Biology Infrastructure provides automated, high-throughput execution. During the first beta, users pay only a fee calculated from each target’s CDS length, starting at US$0.09/bp. Each target protein will be cloned into three PandaPure-compatible vectors and tested for expression and small-scale purification, with no additional charge.

The beta is open to scientists worldwide, including academic and research-institution teams, corporate R&D groups, and independent protein designers, and will support 60 target proteins. Applications close on August 15, 2026. More details: see the PandaPure Cloud page.

The resulting data can help teams narrow the candidate pool for further functional characterization, optimization, or scale-up testing.

04After the Screen: From Candidates to Scale-Up

After the Protein Production Screen, selected candidates can move into functional characterization, optimization, or scale-up testing. Traditional protein development often switches purification methods as scale increases, moving from magnetic beads or other microscale methods to chromatography columns and new process systems. PandaPure preserves the same core mechanism for target-protein capture and sorting from batch screening to larger-scale expression. This continuity can simplify scale-up by reducing changes in purification routes, materials, and operating procedures, creating a more direct path from high-throughput screening to research-scale production.

In a validated enzyme-discovery project, PandaPure progressed from deep-well plates to a 50 L bioreactor at a 20 L culture volume without redesigning or re-optimizing the core workflow.

Follow-on experiments can be performed at Synthetic Biology Infrastructure on request, or users can request a PandaPure technology-transfer package from Ailurus to scale up in their own facilities.

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