News & Comment

Research on disease mechanisms will increasingly be supported by progressively more sophisticated engineered tissues serving as in vitro models of human disease.

To boost the research pipeline of medicines and therapies, the required preclinical work should be designed to facilitate reproducibility.

Clinical implementations of machine learning that are accurate, robust and interpretable will eventually gain the trust of healthcare providers and patients.

Cancer therapies that target multiple biological pathways take advantage of synergistic killing, and decrease the risk of relapse.

Bringing truly personalized cancer vaccination with tumour neoantigens to the clinic will require overcoming the challenges of optimized vaccine design, manufacturing and affordability, and identification of the most suitable clinical setting.

Modelling diseases of the central and peripheral nervous systems and effectively treating neurological disorders via neuronal manipulation requires far better biomaterials and technology than are currently available.

For cell therapies to transition from promises to products, increased efforts need to be put into the identification of the factors and biological mechanisms that affect safety and efficacy, and into the design of cost-effective methods for the harvesting, expansion, manipulation and purification of the cells.

Potent dendritic-cell cancer vaccines could be used to induce functional antitumour immunity without off-target toxicity.

When designing translationally relevant delivery strategies to overcome the physicochemical and biological barriers to getting therapeutics into the right tissues and cells, building on tried-and-tested concepts often pays off.

Accurate diagnostics need technology — from imaging hardware and image reconstruction to machine learning — to detect markers associated with the cause of disease.

Artificial intelligence may eventually help diagnose eye conditions and the risk of cardiovascular disease, solely from retinal images.

The communication of research findings, in both written and oral forms, would benefit from concepts used in cinematographic storytelling.

The translational achievements, commercialization prospects and eventual clinical and societal impacts of biomedical work accrue over a long time. They should be better captured and publicized.