When Yale University’s Craig Crews and Caltech’s Ray Deschaies set up posters next to each other at a meeting in the late 1990s, they were just following the alphabetical plan. But chance meetings can have big effects. Over beers at the end of the day, the poster neighbours brainstormed about a new class of proximity-inducing molecules that could destroy proteins by harnessing the cell’s trash disposal system. Some 25 years later, these heterobifunctional targeted degraders have swept academic and industry labs. And now, a new generation of related molecules that can redirect the other types of cellular machinery are coming through.