Nature Biotechnology

DNA-guided CRISPR–Cas12 for cellular RNA targeting go.nature.com/49SP29d

Widespread DNA off-targeting confounds RNA chromatin occupancy studies go.nature.com/3Pvbf6e

Evidence linking thymic function with health and longevity is piling up, and a cluster of biotechnology companies is trying to regenerate the thymus directly or recapitulate its function to reinvigorate patients’ immunity nature.com/articles/s4158… [🔓read free with login]

@csgarrix @kochinstitute @MITChemE @MGHCSB @BostonChildrens @harvardmed @Das_Riddha A new approach to cancer vaccination yields more powerful T cells #NBTintheNews news.mit.edu/2026/new-appro…

Immune-remodeling mRNAs expressing IRF8 or NIK generate durable antitumor immunity in multiple cancer models go.nature.com/42td2fh

From molecules to meaning: a search engine for the chemistry of life #NBTintheNews today.ucsd.edu/story/from-mol…

Structure-centric searching enables global mapping of the public metabolome go.nature.com/481Sbmk

Deep peptide recognition profiling decodes TCR specificity and enables disease-associated antigen discovery go.nature.com/3QWMRet

Are you joining us at the 2026 HCA General Meeting in 5 week’s time in Boston? If so, you’ll have the opportunity to engage directly with editors from scientific journals during ‘meet-the-editors’ sessions. buff.ly/gnFdhAL #HCA2026GM

Single-cell and spatial proteomics are rapidly maturing. Yet, as measurement resolution, depth and throughput improve, progress is increasingly constrained not by experimental sensitivity but by the ability to integrate proteomic data across experiments, modalities and spatial contexts go.nature.com/3NHDkGP rdcu.be/fij7N

The US Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright, along with federal spending cuts, may limit the potential of synthetic biology to provide innovative solutions for environmental challenges, medicine and biomanufacturing go.nature.com/4cE794D rdcu.be/fikex

A new translational research unit at @WeizmannScience complements the work of the technology transfer office and bridges the translation gap with strategic, operational and resource frameworks that go beyond traditional commercialization infrastructure go.nature.com/4cJwcn4 rdcu.be/fh6eL

Circling back to RNA vaccines go.nature.com/3RzqxHN

How can we translate our growing understanding of the dark genome into therapeutics? We asked experts in the field for their thoughts go.nature.com/4tQ1zTn rdcu.be/e8Eci

Hepatocyte detargeting improves mRNA vaccine immunity in lymphoma model #NBTintheNews via @genengnews genengnews.com/topics/drug-di…

New research challenges understanding of mRNA vaccines and establishes innovative way to make them more effective #NBTintheNews mountsinai.org/about/newsroom…

mRNA vaccine immunity is enhanced by hepatocyte detargeting and not dependent on dendritic cell expression go.nature.com/4eSjV0N

Sharing of big data is a vital driver of innovation in the agri-food sector. @novonordiskfond scientists discuss the main challenges and propose steps to enhance data sharing and exploration from a research funder’s perspective go.nature.com/4raUN86 rdcu.be/fh6mr

A builder and problem solver at heart, she is developing technologies to understand and engineer the roles of cell-surface sugars, called glycans, in the immune system go.nature.com/42sA99y rdcu.be/fh6cx

Progress toward a true virtual cell will depend on uniting AI’s pattern-finding power with the causal rigor of mechanistic models go.nature.com/48muYvd rdcu.be/fh599

For a long time, scientists have been looking for ways to precisely edit the genomes of bacteria. It would allow researchers to engineer bacteria for manufacturing, studying how gut microbes interact, or fighting drug-resistant infections.

What if you could test a drug on a human organ and simultaneously know what would have happened without it? That's what we built. Proud to share our work in @NatureBiotech: digital twins of human lungs 🫁🔥 (paper: nature.com/articles/s4158…) We created digital twins of ex vivo human lungs: multimodal AI models trained on 951 human lungs from the world's largest EVLP dataset at @UHN. Physics-informed ML across physiology, biochemistry, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and imaging, all forecasting together. The key insight: the physical lung receives the treatment. The twin is the untreated control. Paired causal inference on the same organ. No separate cohort. No intersubject noise. Result: we detected drug efficacy with 6 lungs. Traditional methods would need 18. This is what precision preclinical evaluation looks like. From Virtual Cells → Virtual Organs → Virtual Patients. One step toward virtual organs replacing animal testing. Huge congratulations to Elly Zhou (a phd student I co-supervise) for leading this work with exceptional rigor, and to Andrew Sage and @SKeshavjee for building the foundation that made it possible.

1/ Our most recent Inside Valence blog post delves into TxPert, a SOTA model published in @NatureBiotech. The key finding: scale alone is insufficient, even smaller model architectures can achieve top performance when coupled with biological priors. @IhabBendid35780