Anett Schönfelder, Alastair K. Denniston, Alejandro F. Frangi, Christian Johner, Timo Minssen, Kuldev Singh, Stephen Gilbert
{"title":"European Union innovation needs regulatory science excellence centres","authors":"Anett Schönfelder, Alastair K. Denniston, Alejandro F. Frangi, Christian Johner, Timo Minssen, Kuldev Singh, Stephen Gilbert","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01756-x","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41551-026-01756-x","url":null,"abstract":"Fit-for-purpose regulation of medical devices and medical artificial intelligence in Europe needs Centres of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation, providing research on concepts, early evidence generation, and horizon scanning on emerging needs and technologies.","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":"10 9","pages":"1802-1806"},"PeriodicalIF":26.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148620798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Xianglin Ji, Peilin Fang, Youyang Wan, Xi Zhao, Chuanyin Xiong, Feng Guo, Qi Yang, Richard Yan-Do, Lin Qi, Chenjie Xu, Xin Wang, Linfeng Huang, Wenjun Zhang, Zixun Wang, Jia Ke, Peng Shi
{"title":"Sequencing-free spatial profiling of post-transcriptional regulation in fresh tissues using nanoneedle arrays.","authors":"Xianglin Ji, Peilin Fang, Youyang Wan, Xi Zhao, Chuanyin Xiong, Feng Guo, Qi Yang, Richard Yan-Do, Lin Qi, Chenjie Xu, Xin Wang, Linfeng Huang, Wenjun Zhang, Zixun Wang, Jia Ke, Peng Shi","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01745-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-026-01745-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Spatial transcriptomics has transformed tissue analysis but remains constrained by high cost, complex workflows, sequencing dependence and limited access to post-transcriptional regulation in fresh tissues. Here we present a sequencing-free and amplification-free approach for the spatial profiling of post-transcriptional regulation across large tissue sections. The method operates on fresh, minimally processed tissue slices using a nanoneedle array to extract RNA molecules from individual cells while preserving spatial organization. Messenger RNAs, microRNAs and N<sup>6</sup>-methyladenosine-modified RNAs are quantified by multiplexed fluorescence encoding and imaging-based decoding at subcellular resolution. Benchmarking against fluorescence in situ hybridization, immunostaining and bulk measurements demonstrates sensitivity and spatial fidelity comparable to established spatial transcriptomics methods, with reduced cost and workflow complexity. We validate the approach by mapping patterned messenger RNA expression in developing mouse neural tissue and applying it to the olfactory bulb, a layered brain region that provides a stringent test of spatial heterogeneity. Finally, we demonstrate applicability to human biopsy specimens, enabling low cost spatial multi-omics analysis relevant to disease stratification and prognosis.</p>","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":26.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148605798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sophie Stotz, Gina Dunkel, Sabrina Haas, Philipp Seyfried, Johannes Kinzler, Jacqueline Berner, Martin Schaller, Michael Lämmerhofer, Seth G N Grant, Bernd J Pichler, Bettina Weigelin, Kristina Herfert, Andreas Maurer
{"title":"A PET reporter ligand for quantitative imaging of gene expression in the brain.","authors":"Sophie Stotz, Gina Dunkel, Sabrina Haas, Philipp Seyfried, Johannes Kinzler, Jacqueline Berner, Martin Schaller, Michael Lämmerhofer, Seth G N Grant, Bernd J Pichler, Bettina Weigelin, Kristina Herfert, Andreas Maurer","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01748-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-026-01748-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The lack of brain penetrant and biologically stable positron emission tomography reporter systems hampers the development of neurological disease models and the monitoring of gene delivery because existing approaches depend on endogenous receptors that vary unpredictably in pathology. HaloTag, a fully exogenous protein label that forms rapid and irreversible bonds with synthetic ligands, provides a modular platform for engineering reporter probes with defined chemical properties. Here we developed a fluorine-18-labelled small-molecule HaloTag ligand optimized for brain entry and covalent retention at the reporter. The tracer showed specific binding in human cells expressing HaloTag and enabled non-invasive imaging of viral gene transfer to striatal neurons in mice, with clear detection of reporter expressing tissue and rapid clearance from surrounding regions. Optical imaging confirmed viral distribution and reporter expression, and a transgenic model expressing HaloTag fused to a postsynaptic protein demonstrated detection of physiologically expressed intraneuronal targets. This system establishes a modular platform for validating preclinical models and quantifying gene expression in the living brain.</p>","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":26.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148605683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Atmospheric water harvesting for humidity control in medical devices for global health.","authors":"Weixin Guan, Yaxuan Zhao, Bozhi Tian, Xuanhe Zhao, Guihua Yu","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01751-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-026-01751-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), which captures water from air, either by condensing humid air or by using sorbents that bind and release water vapour, is being explored as a decentralized source of clean water where piped supply is absent, intermittent or unsafe<sup>1-5</sup>. Here we highlight the role of AWH as a reversible vapour sorption and controlled condensation strategy to regulate humidity and water activity (the effective availability of water) within biomedical devices. AWH can buffer local hydration and generate small liquid volumes for sampling, improving the robustness of wearables, point-of-care assays and respiratory monitoring in environments where conventional humidity control is unavailable.</p>","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":26.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148605648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sheng Wang, Ruiming Wu, Charles Herndon, Songhao Li, Yihang Liu, Shunsuke Koga, Xiaowei Xu, David E Elder, Jonathan Alex Miles, Annie Jin, Ikuko Hirai, Meaghan Dougher, Jeanne Shen, Zhi Huang
{"title":"Pathology-CoT: learning visual chain-of-thought agents from expert whole-slide image diagnosis behaviour.","authors":"Sheng Wang, Ruiming Wu, Charles Herndon, Songhao Li, Yihang Liu, Shunsuke Koga, Xiaowei Xu, David E Elder, Jonathan Alex Miles, Annie Jin, Ikuko Hirai, Meaghan Dougher, Jeanne Shen, Zhi Huang","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01739-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-026-01739-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Diagnosing a whole-slide image is an interactive, multistage process, yet practical agentic systems that navigate fields, adjust magnification and deliver explainable diagnoses remain lacking, largely because the tacit, experience-based viewing behaviour of expert pathologists is absent from model training data. Here we introduce Pathology-CoT, a framework that converts expert viewing chain-of-thought behaviour into scalable agent supervision through three contributions. First, an artificial intelligence session recorder unobtrusively captures routine navigation in standard whole-slide image viewers and converts raw logs into standardized behavioural commands and bounding boxes. Second, a human-in-the-loop review pipeline turns artificial intelligence-drafted rationales into paired 'where to look' and 'why it matters' supervision, enabling sixfold faster labelling. Third, using these data, we built Pathology-o3, a two-stage agent that proposes regions of interest and performs behaviour-guided reasoning. On gastrointestinal lymph node metastasis detection, Pathology-o3 outperformed state-of-the-art vision-language models, showed consistent gains across multiple vision-language model backbones and maintained strong performance on an independent external validation cohort.</p>","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":26.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148584952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher A Rock, Y Iris Chen, Ruopeng Wang, Anne L Philip, Boris Keil, Rory B Weiner, Sammy Elmariah, Choukri Mekkaoui, Christopher T Nguyen, David E Sosnovik
{"title":"Voxel-scale diffusion tensor phenomapping of the healthy and pressure-overloaded human heart.","authors":"Christopher A Rock, Y Iris Chen, Ruopeng Wang, Anne L Philip, Boris Keil, Rory B Weiner, Sammy Elmariah, Choukri Mekkaoui, Christopher T Nguyen, David E Sosnovik","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01755-y","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41551-026-01755-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging of the heart is typically performed at millimetre-scale resolution, yielding only four to five voxels across the ventricular wall, limiting the measurement of local spatial variation in cardiomyocyte organization. Here we present a submillimetre in vivo cardiac diffusion tensor imaging method achieved during free breathing that facilitates voxel-level characterization of myocardial microstructure. We introduce a phenomapping framework that combines voxelwise diffusion magnitude and anisotropy with radial and circumferential gradients of cardiomyocyte helix angle to identify distinct microstructural environments. The approach was developed in healthy volunteers and applied to patients with severe aortic valve stenosis, who had preserved cardiac function and marked myocardial thickening. Comparisons to conventional resolution imaging, together with downsampling analyses and ex vivo and histological validation, show that these voxel-scale features are less optimally detected using standard techniques. Four data-driven microstructural classes, defined by combined diffusion properties and orientation gradients, were observed in both healthy and pressure-overloaded hearts. Despite substantial hypertrophy, pressure overload was associated with preserved cardiomyocyte spatial organization. This framework supports studies of myocardial microstructural remodelling in vivo.</p>","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":26.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13487968/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148585026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tianyu Han,Riga Wu,Yu Tian,Firas Khader,Lisa C Adams,Keno K Bressem,Christos Davatzikos,Jakob Nikolas Kather,Li Shen,David A Mankoff,Eduardo Mortani Barbosa,Daniel Truhn
{"title":"CLEAR: an auditable foundation model for radiology grounded in clinical concepts.","authors":"Tianyu Han,Riga Wu,Yu Tian,Firas Khader,Lisa C Adams,Keno K Bressem,Christos Davatzikos,Jakob Nikolas Kather,Li Shen,David A Mankoff,Eduardo Mortani Barbosa,Daniel Truhn","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01741-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-026-01741-4","url":null,"abstract":"'Black box' deep learning models for medical image interpretation limit clinical trust and analysis of performance degradation. Here we introduce Concept-Level Embeddings for Auditable Radiology (CLEAR), an auditable foundation model based on clinical concepts. Trained on over 0.87 million image-report pairs from 239,391 patients, CLEAR learns a visual representation and projects chest X-rays into a semantically rich space defined by large language model embeddings, making every prediction decomposable into weighted contributions from individual radiological observations. External validation on four large, physician-annotated datasets from the United States, Europe and Asia shows that CLEAR not only achieves state-of-the-art classification performance but also enables applications: auditable zero-shot pathology detection, systematic identification of radiological confounders and the creation of expert-level concept bottleneck models from data-driven concepts. By integrating clinical knowledge directly into its reasoning process, CLEAR offers a framework for robust model auditing, safer deployment and enhanced physician-AI collaboration, advancing towards trustworthy medical AI.","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":28.1,"publicationDate":"2026-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148552584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Super homotypic targeting by surface engineering of extracellular vesicles.","authors":"Huai-Song Wang,Tianben Ding,Yuhong Liu,Fabio Lisi,Yuqi Zhou,Yaqi Zhao,Xin-Yuan Hu,Zi-Wei Yang,Jing-Lian Su,Mika Hayashi,Natsumi Tiffany Ishii,Hiroki Matsumura,Anel Umirbaeva,Hongwei Guo,Yin-Yu Yan,Fu-Han Gao,Jia-Jing Li,Yasutaka Kitahama,Petra Paiè,Ayumi Taguchi,Kenbun Sone,Yuka Inoue,Takayuki Ueno,Abdullah N Alodhayb,Nao Nitta,Masako Nishikawa,Yutaka Yatomi,Hiroyuki Matsumura,Ya Ding,Masahiro Sonoshita,Dino Di Carlo,Shiro Suetsugu,Keisuke Goda","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01743-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-026-01743-2","url":null,"abstract":"Homotypic targeting is the inherent ability of cells to preferentially interact with cells of the same type, a phenomenon seen in cell adhesion, tissue formation and immune responses. However, its potential remains underexploited. Here we report a strategy to substantially enhance homotypic targeting through extracellular vesicles secreted by cells. By engineering the surface of small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) with lanthanides, we amplify specific cell-sEV interactions by more than 25-fold, enabling the selective capture of sEVs by cells of the same lineage even in the presence of excess off-target sEVs. We term this effect 'super homotypic targeting'. Super homotypic targeting provides a means to distinguish sEVs of different origins within highly heterogeneous sEV populations and enables two applications: using cells to detect specific sEVs and using sEVs to detect specific cells, specifically demonstrated here in the context of cancer detection from blood samples. Super homotypic targeting could hold potential for diagnostics, immunotherapy, drug delivery, rejuvenation and tissue engineering.","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":28.1,"publicationDate":"2026-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148552582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nanosensor-integrated catheters for chemical mapping of bladder cancer biomarkers","authors":"Alessandra Griffo","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01763-y","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41551-026-01763-y","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":"10 7","pages":"1274-1274"},"PeriodicalIF":26.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148459641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Outracing antibiotic resistance with deep learning","authors":"Jelle van der Hilst","doi":"10.1038/s41551-026-01761-0","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41551-026-01761-0","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19063,"journal":{"name":"Nature Biomedical Engineering","volume":"10 7","pages":"1273-1273"},"PeriodicalIF":26.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148459640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}