From the magazine
Counting on Europe
Bayer built the cell and gene therapy toolbox. Now Europe has to decide whether to pay for it.
Building Barcelona’s next masterpiece
Barcelona is famous for its masterpieces: Gaudi's spires, the broken-tile mosaics of Park Güell. Its next may be a first-in-class medicine. Behind the postcard city, a mosaic of scientists drawn from dozens of countries is building one of Europe's densest life sciences clusters.
Mechanomedicine, a new therapeutic language for cancer?
The heart almost never develops cancer. Prof. Serena Zacchigna’s team at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology(ICGEB) and at the University of Trieste, Italy, have worked out why, and stumbled on a new idea for fighting the disease: not with a drug, but with force. Their finding, that the muscle’s mechanical motion switches off the genes cancer cells need to divide, opens a field she calls mechanomedicine, another therapeutic language to set beside chemistry.