Louise von Stechow

An article published in Nature Biotechnology on 7 September 2026 by Alex Zhavoronkov’s team at Insilico Medicine and collaborators marks an important step forward for the field of drugs targeting aging. Using proteomics-based aging clocks, they showed that rentosertib, an …

Drug discovery has never had a richer therapeutic toolbox. Antibody-drug conjugates, antisense oligonucleotides, CRISPR therapeutics, RNA medicines, CAR-T cells, PROTACs, and molecular glues have transformed how medicine can manipulate biology. Yet every modality still depends on the same prerequisite: a …

Biotech treats DNA primarily as a coding material that provides information about disease phenotypes and can serve as a drug target and modality. But beyond the code, DNA is also an attractive programmable nanomaterial. By exploiting the predictability of Watson–Crick …

Part I: A tour of the therapeutic strategies targeting the hallmarks of aging—from cellular reprogramming to senolytics, mTOR inhibitors, and immune rejuvenation.

Preclinical and nonclinical testing of drugs has traditionally relied on animal models to assess efficacy and toxicity before moving into human trials. However, these models raise ethical concerns and are costly and time-consuming. Most importantly, animal models often have low …

Since the discovery of its mechanism in 2012, CRISPR-based gene editing has turned from basic discovery into a bioengineering tool now penetrating biomedicine and enabling breakthroughs in the treatment of rare diseases. The first approved gene editing therapy, Vertex’s Casgevy …

Digital twins are moving from aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing into medicine and drug development, with the potential to transform how we study diseases, conduct clinical trials, and personalize treatment and care. The technology is especially promising for rare diseases, where …

In the quest to understand and treat the over 6,000 rare diseases, researchers encounter a number of limitations – in the amount of available data, access to interdisciplinary expertise, and time that can be spent on research.

Could a …

With DeepMind’s release of AlphaGenome—a deep learning model that can predict the relevance of variants in both coding and non-coding DNA—the so-called “dark genome” has taken center stage in biotech news. AlphaGenome, an “all-in-one” genome exploration model, is …

Rare diseases, which affect more than 300 million people worldwide, are often difficult to diagnose. Many patients wait five years or more for a correct diagnosis and are misdiagnosed at least once along this diagnostic odyssey. In addition to …