This Review highlights recent progress in the development of molecular probes for the selective imaging of specific immune cells to aid understanding of the immune system, as well as disease diagnosis and prognosis.

This Review discusses how microfluidic and other fluidic devices can be leveraged at each stage of cell manufacturing for enhancing the potency, predictability and affordability of adoptive cell therapies.

This Perspective argues that the unavailability of cortical electrodes for chronic use may stall research on adaptive deep brain stimulation for treating psychiatric conditions and that this problem can be addressed via public–private partnerships.

Foundation models can be advantageously harnessed to estimate missing data in multimodal biomedical datasets and to generate realistic synthetic samples.

Non-viral intron knock-ins for incorporating synthetic exons into endogenous introns enable efficient gene targeting and selective gene knockout in successfully edited cells.

A deep-learning model can accurately quantify circulating tumour DNA from the density distribution of cell-free DNA-fragment lengths in plasma from patients with cancer and from healthy individuals.

Minimal tumour perturbations that boost T-cell infiltration can be discovered by using deep learning to analyse large-scale spatial omics profiles of tumours.

A positron emission tomography tracer of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species enables the in vivo quantification of oxidative stress, as shown in mouse models of oxidative stress, stroke and tauopathy.

The pretraining efficiency and generalization of medical foundation models can be enhanced by using synthetic data generated via conditioning with disease labels.

Therapeutic antibodies with enhanced resistance to the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 can be identified via deep mutational learning by screening a combinatorial library of receptor-binding domains for antibody binding and escape.

Antigen design and optimization for broader yet targeted immune stimulation, and targeted antigen delivery, are reshaping vaccine development for infectious diseases and cancer.

Advances in base editing and prime editing, coupled with optimized delivery strategies, are enhancing the efficiency, safety and versatility of genome editing for the treatment of a widening range of genetic diseases.

Combining neuroimaging with molecular and cellular data reveals how microscale features shape large-scale brain networks.

Cas9-based ribonucleoproteins engineered via directed evolution and encapsulated in optimized lipid nanoparticles improve genome-editing efficacies in the livers and lungs of mice.

High-throughput screening led to the identification of artesunate as an antifibrotic agent that targets the glycoprotein myeloid differentiation factor 2 in the infarcted heart.

Organic nanoprobes facilitate the imaging of small deep-seated tumours in mice via the X-ray-mediated generation of long-lasting luminescence.