For papers describing cancer therapies, we often look beyond conceptual advances to prioritize studies that pair strong ideas with rigorous in vivo evidence, clinically coherent models and a credible path to translation. Here, we summarize the major criteria that make cancer therapies truly stand out.

Intracortical microstimulation can elicit artificial sensations in persons who have lost sensation due to neurological injury or disease. This Review discusses intracortical microstimulation mechanisms, explores emerging approaches and notes challenges to current technologies.

Although promising, gene and cell therapies can pose genotoxic risks that complicate clinical application. We describe the molecular basis of these risks, discuss tools to assess genotoxicity and highlight the advantages of non-viral genome engineering technologies for safer genome engineering.

A multiplexed RNA detection method exploits crRNA-dependent variability in Cas13a activity on RNA targets for kinetic barcoding and can be used to distinguish among SARS-CoV-2 variants in clinical samples.

BioMedAgent is a self-evolving LLM multi-agent framework that learns to use various bioinformatics tools and chain them into executable workflows for autonomously carrying out diverse biomedical data tasks initiated by natural-language prompts.

Heterochronic human serum in a microphysiological system of hiPSC-derived white adipose tissue–liver axis allows the study of aging and rejuvenation in humans.

A transformer-based vision system for cardiac MRI offers a generalizable and data-efficient system for diverse tasks in cardiology, offering clear advantages for contextualizing human cardiovascular disease and diagnosing disease.

The Template-Independent Genome Editing for Restoration (TIGER) platform enables efficient and precise correction of frameshift mutations in vivo, incorporates algorithms to score therapeutic guide RNAs and demonstrates restored hearing in a mouse model.

Machine learning was used to screen a library of diverse lipids on the basis of their spatial conformation and identify an LNP formulation that enabled organ-targeted mRNA delivery and tumour suppression. The work highlights the critical role of ionizable lipid conformation in LNP engineering.

For papers describing cancer therapies, we often look beyond conceptual advances to prioritize studies that pair strong ideas with rigorous in vivo evidence, clinically coherent models and a credible path to translation. Here, we summarize the major criteria that make cancer therapies truly stand out.

The purpose of the presubmission enquiry can be a point of confusion for our authors and can vary across journals. This month we hope to demystify its role in the editorial pipeline at Nature Biomedical Engineering.