The use of circulating tumour DNA to screen for cancer in asymptomatic individuals is the goal of Grail, initially set up by Illumina. This company is now raising a large amount of capital to develop this project on a much ...

The concept of precision oncology is straightforward, but the actual results of treating advanced cancer patients with the targeted drug suggested by genomic analysis have been generally disappointing, indicating that this ...

Bacteriophages were advocated as therapeutic agents more than a century ago, but the advent of antibiotics relegated them to a very minor role. Today, multi-drug resistant bacteria are a serious health problem, and phage ...

In clinical oncology, obtaining sequence data from tumour samples has become practical in terms of logistics, turnover time and costs. The major issue now is the interpretation of this sequence to define actionable targets, ...

The announcement of several deals between the DTC genetics firm 23andMe and Genentech, Pfizer and other corporations reveals the real business model of the company: selling access to sets of characterized patients for ...

Recently, a systematic (but limited) search for rare variants implicated in adult height, a highly polygenic trait, has uncovered a number of new variants for which the effect size is inversely correlated with the minor ...

Alternative bases that can fit into the DNA double helix have now been used in vivo to direct the synthesis of proteins incorporating unnatural amino acids. This bioengineering feat is significant at both the conceptual ...