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Even though only a few labs around the world have the means to engineer a purely synthetic virus, debate on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 has resurfaced concerns about the risks and benefits of synthetic virology.
Our new podcast series ‘Hope Lies in Dreams’ highlights the importance of visionaries in shepherding drugs through the setbacks of drug development to commercial success.
The milestone approval for Amgen’s drug Lumakras will galvanize targeted therapy efforts against Ras oncoproteins and provides a powerful new last line of defense for patients with lung cancer.
The Sequencing Quality Control 2 (SEQC2/MAQC-IV) project provides resources to aid sequencing reproducibility and highlights factors that can guide platform and software choice.
The MicroArray Quality Control consortium—a 16-year international effort led by the FDA and involving hundreds of scientists from academia, industry and government—helped make genomic medicine a reality.
Community building should be integrated into the graduate classroom to foster the development of a professional identity and build connections between students and faculty.
A study of the seasonality and overall quantity and quality of Chinese patenting, including international comparisons, suggests that government planning and annual targets encouraged gaming of the system, which increased patent counts but negatively affected patent quality.
Nature Biotechnology’s annual survey highlights university startups that are, among other things, rethinking how to deliver gene-editing therapy and tackling various metabolic conditions, immune disorders and cancer with microbiome treatments or immunotherapy. Michael Eisenstein, Ken Garber, Esther Landhuis, Caroline Seydel and Laura DeFrancesco report.
Stan Crooke rose from poverty to found a company that pioneered antisense drugs. After decades of struggle and years of public doubt, the company created a treatment that has saved thousands of children from the brutal disease spinal muscular atrophy.