Editorials in 2019

The physical properties of living tissues are a compelling source of biomarkers of health and disease.

The discoveries of this year’s Nobel laureates in Physiology and Medicine have improved diagnostic and therapeutic strategies relying on oxygen sensing.

Broadening access to personalized medicines will require scalable and efficient manufacturing processes that help decrease production costs.

Translational cancer nanomedicine needs to increasingly exploit newly discovered tumour-targeting strategies as well as the further optimization of proven means to selectively increase the concentration of cytotoxic drugs in solid tumours.

Soft biomaterials for implantation in the body are increasingly designed to be functional for a finite time and to then disappear via degradation or resorption.

Modelling human tissues in microphysiologically relevant ‘chips’ will increasingly help to unravel mechanistic knowledge underlying disease, and might eventually accelerate the productivity of drug development and predict how individual patients will respond to specific drugs.

Steady innovation in device design for diagnostic assays provides substantial performance gains.

The development of imaging technology for the quantification of optical biomarkers of pathological processes should involve the validation of the biomarkers’ biological accuracy.

Autoimmune diseases should benefit from treatments that piggyback on the successes of cancer immunotherapies.

Peer review relies on organized scepticism and implicit trust. A healthy balance of both qualities should also prevail when peer review fails.

The simplicity and powerful capabilities of CRISPR have led to an explosion of genome-editing applications. Their continued development should be nurtured by scientific and legal environments that discourage and penalize irresponsible uses of the technology.

Implantable sensors and electrodes that take advantage of new materials, device designs and fabrication strategies enable new and improved biomedical applications.