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Job titles of the future: Nature’s drug designer

In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use. 

For Merck, he’d developed precision therapies for cancer, HIV, and diabetes that could target disease while minimizing harm to healthy cells. But as a lifelong nature lover, he was increasingly concerned about the health of ecosystems and wondered whether his expertise could transfer. Animals, he learned, are often treated with pharmaceuticals formulated for humans, which affect them like old-school cancer drugs: Though intended to kill abnormal cells, they’re indiscriminate in the harm they cause. For instance, the standard of care for frogs infected with a deadly skin infection is itraconazole, an antifungal that is often lethal for the amphibian.

Cernak imagines a world where “the patient was always meant to be a frog in the first place, from the beginning to the end.” Now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, he’s worked on all types of creatures, from a Gila monster with a parasite to bald eagles with avian flu. Here’s what it takes to treat nature’s patients.

Experience with protein-modeling software 

Developing any type of drug is extremely expensive, failure-prone, and slow-going. But AI can speed up the entire drug-­design workflow, says Cernak. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold model allows him to visualize a mutant protein’s three-­dimensional structure on a screen—rather than growing it on a plate, the traditional methodology—and then quickly generate possible new drugs that would latch onto that structure. The next step is to run a series of reactions and see which potential drugs may be effective; with the help of robots in the lab, he can speed through as many as 1,500 per day. 

Curiosity about creatures of all sizes

Cernak isn’t selective with his patients. For example, he worked on a treatment for loggerhead sea turtles after he was shocked to learn that the iconic species suffered from contagious tumors. He feels especially drawn to creatures that have helped humans, like the Gila monster, whose hormones have informed popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. And it’s not just animals; he’s also developing a precision insecticide to treat hemlock trees under attack from invasive species. 

A pioneering spirit

Cernak refers to this new discipline as “conservation chemistry.” It’s a combination of words with a loaded history, from DDT decimating US bald eagle populations in the 1960s, to cow painkillers killing millions of Indian vultures in the ’90s. He recognizes the risks, but Cernak feels that excluding chemists from conservation is a missed opportunity. 

“I’m just sick of looking at the chemical tools that are used in the conservation space, and they’re not cutting-edge,” he says. “It’s like, how do you have this super high-tech engine over here for making human medicines, while we’re living through a mass extinction?” 

Anna Gibbs is a journalist who covers the intersection between science and society.

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Opinion: We published in Nature Medicine in 2025 for free. In 2026, it cost us $12,850

In June 2025, I led a study that was accepted for publication in Nature Medicine. The cost to publish this manuscript, which reported the results of a randomized clinical trial, was zero dollars. The paper underwent rigorous peer view and extensive edits and copy editing by the editorial staff. This study was the result of years of work by a large team of staff and investigators at Johns Hopkins and was funded by a combination of philanthropy and grants from the National Institutes of Health (your and my tax dollars).

In 2026, I was part of a group that published in Nature Medicine a different NIH-funded study — also the results of years of hard work supported by your and my tax dollars. To comply with the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy that went into effect on July 1, 2025, we paid $12,850 to the publisher. This charge was for open-access fees, now required by the publisher, and was non-negotiable.

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Opinion: How long Covid’s scientific stalemate made it politically erasable

Mitchell Miglis had two months left. The Stanford University neurology professor had spent two years studying what long Covid does to the human nervous system — why patients’ hearts race when they stand, why their blood pressure collapses, why their bodies lose the ability to regulate themselves. His National Institutes of Health RECOVER grant was weeks from completion, data collected, analysis underway.

On March 25, 2025, a termination notice arrived. The grant was “incompatible with agency priorities.” No modification could bring it into alignment. “This is not only disappointing and demoralizing from a scientific perspective,” Miglis wrote in the Sick Times, a publication about long Covid, “but in a broader sense, as a clinician who sees these patients every day, a much larger disappointment to the patient community.”

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STAT+: Scientists see promise in NIH proposal to cap number of grants they receive

Throughout Lawrence Tabak’s 25 years at the National Institutes of Health, serving first as the head of one of its institutes before becoming principal deputy director and subsequently acting director, he took many trips to universities around the country to talk to researchers. He made a point to prioritize state schools and smaller institutions. 

Never on those visits was there a shortage of researchers brimming with ideas they hoped would attract the funding to pursue. But without easy access to leaders within a field or top-of-the-line lab equipment, researchers outside top universities often struggle to compete for grants from the NIH.

“There was never an institution I went to that I wasn’t blown away by a few young people,” Tabak said. “But it made me upset, because I realized the maldistribution of resources was compromising their ability to reach their potential.” 

One proposal that’s been floated several times to help spread the wealth is to cap the number of grants individual researchers can receive from the NIH. Most recently, it was proposed in 2017 but was quickly walked back by the first Trump administration after pushback from high-rolling universities who would be harmed by the policy. 

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App-Controlled “Wound Zipper” Aids Bespoke Skin Healing

A biomechanical device controlled through a smartphone can quickly close complex wounds, with preclinical research showing it can encourage healing and reduce scarring.

The multi-axis stretchable wound zipper (MSWZ) shrinks and responds like human skin to enable personalized fast and precise healing at a molecular level.

The device, outlined in Advanced Science, mechanically stretches and contracts wounds in multiple directions through a smartphone app and it was able to heal to complex wounds in rats.

The zipper supported matrix remodeling to reduce the risk of scar formation and encouraged blood flow to supply energy and nutrients for optimal healing.

Researcher Yiming Zhang, PhD, from Xinqiao Hospital in Chongqing, China, said it addressed the limitations of conventional surgical sutures or skin staples that only contract in a single direction without being able to manage the force applied.

“We believe this technology offers an innovative solution for future wound care, ultimately alleviating patient suffering and significantly accelerating the healing process,” he said.

The multi-axis wound zipper is engineered from electro-thermally driven mechanical metamaterials and is encapsulated between two layers of polyurethane dressing before use.

It is constructed from a lattice based on nickel-titanium shape-memory alloy that can freely stretch in six directions, spaced 60 degrees apart. This enables it to conform to complex wound morphologies, with precise, programmable mechanical contraction possible through the smartphone app.

A circular notch in the center of the underlying dressing allows the zipper to stick only to the wound margins and not to the center of the wound so that mechanical contraction forces do not act directly on the central wound tissue.

This “loop adhesion” design is better than traditionally uniform dressing structures, the researchers explain, as it allows the zipper to draw flat against the wound edge—like a drawstring bag—for smoother, more uniform closure.

The device also incorporates a Bluetooth-enabled microcontroller unit, which allows the patient to precisely set and dynamically regulate the wound contraction strength through a mobile app. This intelligent closure system allows contraction to be adjusted according to personal comfort and avoids the pain of over contraction.

Pre-stretched multi-axis wound zippers were better than surgical suturing for linear wounds in rats, achieving immediate and complete closure and a wound healing rate of nearly 90% on the first day.

When used for circular wounds, the wound zipper was also better than surgical suturing and had a superior wound-healing rate above 95% within eight days. It restored the epithelial barrier, reduced the width of the wound, and promoted reconstruction of the collagen matrix.

It was also able to heal the spindle- and oval-shaped wounds frequently seen in the clinic.

Maximum wound closure rates for linear, triangular, rectangular, and circular wounds were 100%, 84.85%, 81.99%, and 87.40%, respectively.

Immunohistochemistry revealed that the wound zipper promoted blood flow to deliver energy and nutrients for healing and supported matrix remodeling to reduce the formation of scar tissue.

Mechanical contraction using the device upregulated vascular regeneration-related transcription factors and speeded the restoration of local perfusion. At the same time, it promoted proliferation and migration of keratinocytes, thereby accelerating re-epithelialization.

In addition, by reducing the skin tension at the wound margin, the wound zipper inhibited the overactivation of myofibroblasts, facilitated orderly collagen matrix remodeling, and decreased the risk of scar formation.

“Collectively, these findings indicate that the MSWZ can deliver rapid, robust, and programmable multi-axis mechanical contraction suited for personalized management of diverse wound types,” the researchers concluded.

“Its conformability to skin and favorable safety profile further support its potential for future clinical translation.”

The post App-Controlled “Wound Zipper” Aids Bespoke Skin Healing appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.

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STAT+: Private Medicare plans erect barriers to rehab care in pursuit of profit, federal investigators find

The nation’s dominant Medicare Advantage insurers denied rehabilitative care for older and disabled Americans at higher rates than industry peers, then frequently overturned those denials when patients appealed, federal investigators found. The pattern reinforces longstanding concerns that insurers like UnitedHealth Group and Humana are profiting by forcing seriously ill and injured adults 65 and older to fight for care recommended by their doctors.

These health plans hired a UnitedHealth subsidiary called NaviHealth to evaluate requests for rehabilitative care. NaviHealth uses artificial intelligence to examine people’s care needs and was the focus of a STAT investigative series in 2023 that found its denials often resulted in poor outcomes for desperately ill patients.

Now, federal investigators are reporting the insurers themselves concluded NaviHealth’s denials often didn’t stand up to scrutiny. When patients appealed their blocked care, the insurers overturned the company’s denials of nursing home care 97% of the time, according to a report from the Office of Inspector General for the Health and Human Services Department.

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