The Biggest Breakthroughs in Cell Biology in 2025

As 2025 comes to a close, the editors at The Scientist asked researchers to reflect on the biggest breakthroughs in cell biology this year. They named advances in everything from embryo models for developmental biology research to converting peripheral cells in the brain into microglia for future therapeutic applications. Read on to see what other discoveries they called the most exciting of 2025.

Stem Cell Models and Bioinformatics Tools

Ophir Klein, developmental biologist, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

The development of stem cell-based embryo models and various other iterations like gastruloids has been very impactful in terms of developmental stem cell biology. They’ve opened up avenues to look into development outside of the mother. Also, other approaches like spatial transcriptomics have been a huge leap forward in helping us understand gene expression in situ. Both are changing our ability to understand biology.

Lari Hӓkkinen, molecular biologist, University of British Columbia

The use of bioinformatics tools to unravel subpopulations of cells that are involved in various diseases has been a big breakthrough this year. The study describing the signaling mechanisms underlying scarless healing of oral wounds from Ophir Klein and Michael Longaker’s groups, published in Science Translational Medicine, is a good example of that.¹ These cutting edge bioinformatics methods provide a lot of information that we didn't have access to previously. And, that information is usually open to all scientists in the world because these data sets are deposited into accessible repositories. People can use this information for their own purposes, and I think that that is very important.

Immune Cell Diagnostics and Biologics

Holden Maecker, cellular immunologist, Stanford University

There was a recent Science paper from Scott Boyd's group that I thought was really interesting.² It really kind of changed my outlook on human immunology-based diagnostic testing. They looked at more than a dozen autoimmune and related diseases, and they had a set of T cell receptor sequences that they could pull from whole blood RNA sequencing. They found that they could train an AI to basically differentiate the diseases based on T cell receptor repertoires and from bulk sequencing data. I thought that was interesting because as a cellular immunologist, I always thought we had to look at single cells, like using flow cytometry or something because the immune cells are all so different from each other that we need to look at that single cell level. But this was showing that we can take bulk sequencing data and find some real differences. I thought that was game changing for the field.

Shirley Jiang, clinical immunologist and allergist, Stanford University

A lot of the great things that are coming down the pipeline are biologics. I believe it was a couple of months ago when one of our biologics Dupilumab was approved for the purpose of chronic urticaria, which are chronic hives. And then last year, Omalizumab was approved for the purposes of food allergy. So, there's a lot of active research that's being done when it comes to allergic conditions and these types of treatments that we have available. I think that's just some of the examples of things that are coming.

From Microglia and Macrophages to GLP-1s

David Gate, neuroimmunologist, Northwestern University

I was involved in this study—so I'm a little bit biased—but there was a paper by Kiavash Movahedi’s group.³ They showed that they could induce peripheral cells in the brain to become microglia. It’s a very interesting study, and it has broad implications for the field because it could be therapeutically relevant. It could be possible to replace people's microglia in their brains.

Andrew Shepherd, neuroimmunologist, University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center

A paper from Clifford Woolf’s team in Nature really drew attention to the fact that, in neuropathy, the presence of macrophages in and around damaged nerves can be a good thing.⁴ There, they serve a protective function.

Ivan de Araujo, neuroscientist, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

I'm not sure if it's a new breakthrough, but something that is surprising and really caught everybody's attention is the efficacy of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. I am not convinced we know the mechanism very well yet—why people show this resilience towards ingesting food. But certainly, it's something that took the field over, and many studies now are geared towards understanding this effect. The success of the drug is quite surprising. The fact that almost anybody can use it and that the effects last as long as the administration is sustained is interesting.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.