News & Comment

The proposal for an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) being considered by the United States Congress is bold and necessary, yet will require unrelenting focus, independence and a measured risk-taking culture.

In machine learning applied to healthcare, challenges with the data stand between feasibility testing and clinically robust deployments.

The proliferation of synthetic data in artificial intelligence for medicine and healthcare raises concerns about the vulnerabilities of the software and the challenges of current policy.

The effectiveness of cancer immunotherapies will benefit from a range of strategies — new, or borrowed from other classes of therapeutic — to trigger durable immune responses.

The phagocytic clearance of the large fraction of transplanted cells that typically undergo rapid cell death contributes to therapeutic outcomes.

The availability of higher-quality biomedical and clinical data is widening the reach and usefulness of data-fitted biophysical models and of data-driven mathematical and statistical modelling.

To facilitate diagnostic radiology at the point of care, improvements in imaging hardware and processing software that raise the signal away from the noise floor are being leveraged toward improving device portability or accessibility.

The preclinical performance of subretinal or intracorneal delivery of Cas9 nucleases encoded in RNA foreshadows safer and effective one-and-done gene therapies for eye diseases.

We encourage openness in publishing, and promote increased transparency in peer review.

Physician-scientist who pioneered molecular imaging for the early detection of cancer.

Upcoming inexpensive assays for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in less than one hour at points of care or at home should help suppress the COVID-19 pandemic.

Proactive efforts towards the development of new vaccines and antivirals, and the elimination of bottlenecks in vaccine development, will be essential to containing and eradicating future pandemics.

More clinical trial data are needed to determine whether sera from COVID-19-convalescent patients and neutralizing monoclonal antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 antigens can prevent COVID-19 or reduce the severity of the disease in high-risk populations.

Increased power efficiency, standardization and functionality enhance the biomedical prospects of electronic devices for interfacing the body.

In less than a decade, the genome-editing technology now recognized by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has impacted the biological and biomedical sciences widely. What’s next for CRISPR in biomedicine?

Obtaining valuable datasets is often arduous, costly and time-consuming. Give them away for wider reuse.

Results from the early trials of vaccine candidates against SARS-CoV-2 signal the fitness of vaccine technologies soon to be tested at scale.

Two recent high-profile retractions of COVID-19 papers exemplify that trust cannot be taken for granted. To strengthen it, scientific review will have to become more transparent.

Repurposed drugs, inhibitors of inflammatory cytokines, neutralizing monoclonal antibodies and sera from convalescent patients will help ease the burden of COVID-19 on healthcare systems.

Further COVID-19 outbreaks are unavoidable. To detect and suppress them, governments ought to implement a range of public health measures aided by technology.