Dispatches from the Front

Biological research today is a vast enterprise, with thousands of laboratories working to answer fundamental but sometimes obscure questions about living systems.   My stories are field notes from this mostly unremarked-on world, jottings that seek to shed a bit of light on some remarkable advances in our understanding of nature and in our efforts to treat human disease.  I focus on cell biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, human genetics, physiology and pharmacology, using the tools of journalism—mainly informed  interviews with the scientists themselves–to make sense of the crucial questions that motivate today’s research.

Chemical proteomics is an emerging field that promises to expand the druggable space, and has already pioneered some new drugs and targets. Link (above right) to my July 2025 Nature Biotechnology feature story.

Link to my May, 2025 story in Nature about a unique collaboration between academic cancer scientists and a biotech company to discover and advance targeted protein degraders for childhood cancers.

Married University of Michigan chemists Jolanta Grembecka and Tomasz Cierpicki founded the field of menin inhibitors, a rare epigenetic drug success story. The first menin inhibitor was recently approved for treating leukemia. Link (above right) to my August, 2024 story in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

My news feature on molecular glue degraders appeared in the April, 2024 issue of Nature Biotechnology.

With the success of the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines, companies are now focusing on mRNA therapeutics. But this is a much harder problem, as I write in the October, 2022 issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

PROTACs are small molecule drugs that harness the cell’s disposal system to degrade disease-causing proteins. The field is exploding, but it faces a number of hurdles, as I write in Nature Biotechnology.

The field of epitranscriptomics, or RNA epigenetics, is taking off, offering new insights into cancer, memory, aging and virtually every aspect of biology. You can read my report in the July 5, 2019 issue of Science.

NASH (recently renamed MASH) has replaced hepatitis C as the most important nonalcoholic liver disease. Read how researchers and companies are responding. (Click on link at upper right).

My story on liquid-liquid phase separation, a 2018 Science magazine “Breakthrough of the Year” runner up, appeared in the magazine’s December 21 special issue .