Oftentimes innovation is incremental. After all, even big, brash new ideas have nuts and bolts that can be endlessly tweaked to improve performance, efficiency, and utility. This year’s Top 10 Innovations winners do include bold, new platforms that look primed to rev up discovery in basic biology, drug development, and clinical labs. But the list also features products that speak to the important, but often underappreciated, tinkering that drives life science innovation.
Just as geneticists might revel in the release of a new platform capable of generating long-read sequences with single-molecule resolution, synthetic biologists eagerly await the development of improved CRISPR-Cas9 guide RNAs and nucleases to facilitate ever more efficient and precise genome editing. Like biology itself, life science technologies are often more than the sum of their parts.
Also worth mentioning are the more clinically relevant innovations that made this year’s Top 10 list. Synthetic human kidney tissue that brings properties of the organs to the petri dish and specially designed panels that quantify a host of biomarkers in various samples promise not only to enhance work in the lab, but to change lives in the clinic. Advances like these remind us that innovation and the ...
