Outlook in 2019

When two pharmaceutical companies turned their attention to a rare condition, they came up with different strategies for targeting RNA. Now, RNA therapies for other hereditary conditions are within the sights of the industry.

From clinical trials to diagnosis and surgery, artificial intelligence has the potential to transform medicine.

Without careful implementation, artificial intelligence could widen health-care inequality.

Artificial intelligence could help clinicians to interpret scans and tissue samples.

Laboratory-automation start-ups are borrowing a page from the software industry.

The treatment of many physical and mental-health conditions is going digital.

Big data and artificial intelligence could help to accelerate clinical testing.

The digitisation of medical records in the United States has brought benefits, but not everyone is content with how they have been implemented.

Autonomous systems are beginning to equal human specialists at precision surgical tasks.

Science targets an evasive virus.

Adoption of molecular tests for influenza has been slow — partly because of their high cost.

Farms help to spread influenza but they might be an early warning system for the next human pandemic.

The rise of environmental resistance to the drugs used to combat flu is a potential disaster — but one that we can avert, argues Josef Järhult.

By monitoring social media, scientists can monitor outbreaks as they happen.

Understanding how the influenza virus replicates inside the body is helping researchers develop a wider range of antiviral drugs.

A better understanding of the immune response to influenza is driving development of vaccines that protect against many strains of the virus.

Can the latest techniques speed up the dangerously slow production of flu vaccines?

Escaping the drug crisis.

Understanding how the opioid epidemic arose in the United States could help to predict how it might spread to other countries.

Pharmacologist Yasmin Hurd sees promise in the cannabis-derived chemical cannabidiol for mitigating opioid dependence.