NanoScope

There’s something quietly remarkable about the idea that cancer might leave traces in your blood long before you notice anything is wrong. Not obvious signs — just fragments. Tiny pieces of DNA shed by…

There’s a comforting story that’s going around about AI and medicine: feed a model enough data, and out pops the next miracle drug. It’s a tidy narrative. It’s also not quite true, and the…

There are few things in oncology more sobering than paediatric cancer statistics. Neuroblastoma — a tumour that develops in immature nerve cells and typically affects children under five — accounts for around 15% of…

Bladder cancer has an unfair reputation for being survivable — which it often is, when caught early. The less-discussed part is what “early” actually looks like in practice: roughly 85,000 people are diagnosed in…

There is a version of this story that ends badly. It almost did. KJ Muldoon was born with severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency — a mouthful of a diagnosis that essentially means his…

There’s a particular kind of pressure in a neurosurgical theatre. A surgeon has just removed a small piece of brain tissue — a biopsy, perhaps only a millimetre or two across — and what…

There is a particular frustration in oncology that does not get discussed enough outside of research circles: cancer adapts. You give a patient a drug. It works — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes briefly — and…

There is a reason glioblastoma has gone decades without a new approved drug. It is not that scientists haven’t tried. It is that the brain, in its infinite wisdom, has constructed a wall so…

There’s a compound in your skin that protects you from UV radiation, tints peacock feathers iridescent blue without a single drop of blue pigment, and is found in deep-sea fish that have never once…