Outlook

A former paediatric oncologist and molecular biologist with experience in academia and industry, Perry Nisen was senior vice-president for science and innovation at GlaxoSmithKline in 2014 before becoming chief executive at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, California. He discusses the challenges facing drug discovery in the era of big data.

Collaboration and competition are spurring on major '-omic' projects.

Wearable sensors and smartphones are providing a flood of information and empowering population-wide studies.

Precision medicine demands precise matching of deep genomic and phenotypic models — and the deeper you go, the more you know.

Organizing and accessing biomedical big data will require quite different business models, say Philip E. Bourne, Jon R. Lorsch and Eric D. Green.

Mark Caulfield is chief scientist at Genomics England, which was set up in 2013 to deliver the UK 100,000 Genomes Project, initially focusing on cancers, rare diseases and infection. Caulfield, a cardiovascular clinician and researcher, spoke about the UK approach to big data in biomedicine and the role of Genomics England — including how it plans to embed genomic medicine in Britain's National Health Service (NHS).

Researchers are struggling to analyse the steadily swelling troves of '-omic' data in the quest for patient-centred health care.

Batteries are key to powering portable devices and developing a modern energy network. Researchers are scrambling to develop iterations that can overcome the current limitations. By Sujata Gupta, infographic by Nigel Hawtin.

The energy density of batteries will need to be substantially increased and their cost decreased if renewable energy is to replace fossil fuels. Here are four important questions.

Swapping the liquid electrolyte in batteries for a safer solid-state interior is bringing electric cars to the mass market.

Battery recycling can be hard, energy intensive and uneconomic. But soon, dead power cells could be more easily resurrected.

Flow batteries, which release electricity through fluid-based reactions, could revolutionize renewable-energy storage.

Lithium-ion batteries enabled smartphones to flourish. The next innovation will upend transportation and the grid, says George Crabtree.

Electrical grids increasingly depend on intermittent renewable sources. To smooth the supply out, utilities companies are testing alternatives to storing energy in conventional batteries.

Researchers are developing a type of battery that has ten times the power of conventional batteries.

Susumu Tonegawa unlocked the genetic secrets behind antibodies' diverse structures, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987. Having since moved fields, he tells Keikantse Matlhagela about his latest work on the neuroscience of happy and sad memories.

Elizabeth Blackburn shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres — the protective caps at the end of chromosomes — and for identifying the enzyme telomerase, which maintains telomere length. Now at the University of California, San Francisco, she offers Elena Tucker an insight into her life inside and outside academia.

François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Higgs for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that gives mass to subatomic particles. For this work, he collaborated with Robert Brout, who died in 2011. He looks back on his contribution to science with Thifhelimbilu Daphney Bucher.