Three technologies that will shape biotech in 2026

Earlier this week, MIT Technology Review published its annual list of Ten Breakthrough Technologies. As always, it features technologies that made the news last year, and which—for better or worse—stand to make waves in the coming years. They’re the technologies you should really be paying attention to.

This year’s list includes tech that’s set to transform the energy industry, artificial intelligence, space travel—and of course biotech and health. Our breakthrough biotechnologies for 2026 involve editing a baby’s genes and, separately, resurrecting genes from ancient species. We also included a controversial technology that offers parents the chance to screen their embryos for characteristics like height and intelligence. Here’s the story behind our biotech choices.

A base-edited baby!

In August 2024, KJ Muldoon was born with a rare genetic disorder that allowed toxic ammonia to build up in his blood. The disease can be fatal, and KJ was at risk of developing neurological disorders. At the time, his best bet for survival involved waiting for a liver transplant.

Then he was offered an experimental gene therapy—a personalized “base editing” treatment designed to correct the specific genetic “misspellings” responsible for his disease. It seems to have worked! Three doses later, KJ is doing well. He took his first steps in December, shortly before spending his first Christmas at home.

KJ’s story is hugely encouraging. The team behind his treatment is planning a clinical trial for infants with similar disorders caused by different genetic mutations. The team members hope to win regulatory approval on the back of a small trial—a move that could make the expensive treatment (KJ’s cost around $1 million) more accessible, potentially within a few years.

Others are getting in on the action, too. Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, assisted the team that developed KJ’s treatment. He recently cofounded Aurora Therapeutics, a startup that hopes to develop gene-editing drugs for another disorder called phenylketonuria (PKU). The goal is to obtain regulatory approval for a single drug that can then be adjusted or personalized for individuals without having to go through more clinical trials.

US regulators seem to be amenable to the idea and have described a potential approval pathway for such “bespoke, personalized therapies.” Watch this space.

Gene resurrection

It was a big year for Colossal Biosciences, the biotech company hoping to “de-extinct” animals like the woolly mammoth and the dodo. In March, the company created what it called “woolly mice”—rodents with furry coats and curly whiskers akin to those of woolly mammoths.

The company made an even more dramatic claim the following month, when it announced it had created three dire wolves. These striking snow-white animals were created by making 20 genetic changes to the DNA of gray wolves based on genetic research on ancient dire wolf bones, the company said at the time.

Whether these animals can really be called dire wolves is debatable, to say the least. But the technology behind their creation is undeniably fascinating. We’re talking about the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA, which can then be introduced into cells from other, modern-day species.

Analysis of ancient DNA can reveal all sorts of fascinating insights into human ancestors and other animals. And cloning, another genetic tool used here, has applications not only in attempts to re-create dead pets but also in wildlife conservation efforts. Read more here.

Embryo scoring

IVF involves creating embryos in a lab and, typically, “scoring” them on their likelihood of successful growth before they are transferred to a person’s uterus. So far, so uncontroversial.

Recently, embryo scoring has evolved. Labs can pinch off a couple of cells from an embryo, look at its DNA, and screen for some genetic diseases. That list of diseases is increasing. And now some companies are taking things even further, offering prospective parents the opportunity to select embryos for features like height, eye color, and even IQ.

This is controversial for lots of reasons. For a start, there are many, many factors that contribute to complex traits like IQ (a score that doesn’t capture all aspects of intelligence at any rate). We don’t have a perfect understanding of those factors, or how selecting for one trait might influence another.

Some critics warn of eugenics. And others note that whichever embryo you end up choosing, you can’t control exactly how your baby will turn out (and why should you?!). Still, that hasn’t stopped Nucleus, one of the companies offering these services, from inviting potential customers to have their “best baby.” Read more here.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

America’s new dietary guidelines ignore decades of scientific research

The new year has barely begun, but the first days of 2026 have brought big news for health. On Monday, the US’s federal health agency upended its recommendations for routine childhood vaccinations—a move that health associations worry puts children at unnecessary risk of preventable disease.

There was more news from the federal government on Wednesday, when health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his colleagues at the Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture unveiled new dietary guidelines for Americans. And they are causing a bit of a stir.

That’s partly because they recommend products like red meat, butter, and beef tallow—foods that have been linked to cardiovascular disease, and that nutrition experts have been recommending people limit in their diets.

These guidelines are a big deal—they influence food assistance programs and school lunches, for example. So this week let’s look at the good, the bad, and the ugly advice being dished up to Americans by their government.

The government dietary guidelines have been around since the 1980s. They are updated every five years, in a process that typically involves a team of nutrition scientists who have combed over scientific research for years. That team will first publish its findings in a scientific report, and, around a year later, the finalized Dietary Guidelines for Americans are published.

The last guidelines covered the period 2020 to 2025, and new guidelines were expected in the summer of 2025. Work had already been underway for years; the scientific report intended to inform them was published back in 2024. But the publication of the guidelines was delayed by last year’s government shutdown, Kennedy said last year. They were finally published yesterday.

Nutrition experts had been waiting with bated breath. Nutrition science has evolved slightly over the last five years, and some were expecting to see new recommendations. Research now suggests, for example, that there is no “safe” level of alcohol consumption.

We are also beginning to learn more about health risks associated with some ultraprocessed foods (although we still don’t have a good understanding of what they might be, or what even counts as “ultraprocessed”.) And some scientists were expecting to see the new guidelines factor in environmental sustainability, says Gabby Headrick, the associate director of food and nutrition policy at George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety & Nutrition Security in Washington DC.

They didn’t.

Many of the recommendations are sensible. The guidelines recommend a diet rich in whole foods, particularly fresh fruits and vegetables. They recommend avoiding highly processed foods and added sugars. They also highlight the importance of dietary protein, whole grains, and “healthy” fats.

But not all of them are, says Headrick. The guidelines open with a “new pyramid” of foods. This inverted triangle is topped with “protein, dairy, and healthy fats” on one side and “vegetables and fruits” on the other.

USDA

There are a few problems with this image. For starters, its shape—nutrition scientists have long moved on from the food pyramids of the 1990s, says Headrick. They’re confusing and make it difficult for people to understand what the contents of their plate should look like. That’s why scientists now use an image of a plate to depict a healthy diet.

“We’ve been using MyPlate to describe the dietary guidelines in a very consumer-friendly, nutrition-education-friendly way for over the last decade now,” says Headrick. (The UK’s National Health Service takes a similar approach.)

And then there’s the content of that food pyramid. It puts a significant focus on meat and whole-fat dairy produce. The top left image—the one most viewers will probably see first—is of a steak. Smack in the middle of the pyramid is a stick of butter. That’s new. And it’s not a good thing.

While both red meat and whole-fat dairy can certainly form part of a healthy diet, nutrition scientists have long been recommending that most people try to limit their consumption of these foods. Both can be high in saturated fat, which can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease—the leading cause of death in the US. In 2015, on the basis of limited evidence, the World Health Organization classified red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” 

Also concerning is the document’s definition of “healthy fats,” which includes butter and beef tallow (a MAHA favorite). Neither food is generally considered to be as healthy as olive oil, for example. While olive oil contains around two grams of saturated fat per tablespoon, a tablespoon of beef tallow has around six grams of saturated fat, and the same amount of butter contains around seven grams of saturated fat, says Headrick.

“I think these are pretty harmful dietary recommendations to be making when we have established that those specific foods likely do not have health-promoting benefits,” she adds.

Red meat is not exactly a sustainable food, and neither are dairy products. And the advice on alcohol is relatively vague, recommending that people “consume less alcohol for better overall health” (which might leave you wondering: Less than what?).

There are other questionable recommendations in the guidelines. Americans are advised to include more protein in their diets—at levels between 1.2 and 1.6 grams daily per kilo of body weight, 50% to 100% more than recommended in previous guidelines. There’s a risk that increasing protein consumption to such levels could raise a person’s intake of both calories and saturated fats to unhealthy levels, says José Ordovás, a senior nutrition scientist at Tufts University. “I would err on the low side,” he says.

Some nutrition scientists are questioning why these changes have been made. It’s not as though the new recommendations were in the 2024 scientific report. And the evidence on red meat and saturated fat hasn’t changed, says Headrick.

In reporting this piece, I contacted many contributors to the previous guidelines, and some who had led research for 2024’s scientific report. None of them agreed to comment on the new guidelines on the record. Some seemed disgruntled. One merely told me that the process by which the new guidelines had been created was “opaque.”

“These people invested a lot of their time, and they did a thorough job [over] a couple of years, identifying [relevant scientific studies],” says Ordovás. “I’m not surprised that when they see that [their] work was ignored and replaced with something [put together] quickly, that they feel a little bit disappointed,” he says.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Take our quiz on the year in health and biotechnology

In just a couple of weeks, we’ll be bidding farewell to 2025. And what a year it has been! Artificial intelligence is being incorporated into more aspects of our lives, weight-loss drugs have expanded in scope, and there have been some real “omg” biotech stories from the fields of gene therapy, IVF, neurotech, and more.   

As always, the team at MIT Technology Review has been putting together our 2026 list of breakthrough technologies. That will be published in the new year (watch this space). In the meantime, my colleague Antonio Regalado has compiled his traditional list of the year’s worst technologies.

I’m inviting you to put your own memory to the test. Just how closely have you been paying attention to the Checkup emails that have been landing in your inbox this year?!

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Expanded carrier screening: Is it worth it?

This week I’ve been thinking about babies. Healthy ones. Perfect ones. As you may have read last week, my colleague Antonio Regalado came face to face with a marketing campaign in the New York subway asking people to “have your best baby.”

The company behind that campaign, Nucleus Genomics, says it offers customers a way to select embryos for a range of traits, including height and IQ. It’s an extreme proposition, but it does seem to be growing in popularity—potentially even in the UK, where it’s illegal.

The other end of the screening spectrum is transforming too. Carrier screening, which tests would-be parents for hidden genetic mutations that might affect their children, initially involved testing for specific genes in at-risk populations.

Now, it’s open to almost everyone who can afford it. Companies will offer to test for hundreds of genes to help people make informed decisions when they try to become parents. But expanded carrier screening comes with downsides. And it isn’t for everyone.

That’s what I found earlier this week when I attended the Progress Educational Trust’s annual conference in London.

First, a bit of background. Our cells carry 23 pairs of chromosomes, each with thousands of genes. The same gene—say, one that codes for eye color—can come in different forms, or alleles. If the allele is dominant, you only need one copy to express that trait. That’s the case for the allele responsible for brown eyes. 

If the allele is recessive, the trait doesn’t show up unless you have two copies. This is the case with the allele responsible for blue eyes, for example.

Things get more serious when we consider genes that can affect a person’s risk of disease. Having a single recessive disease-causing gene typically won’t cause you any problems. But a genetic disease could show up in children who inherit the same recessive gene from both parents. There’s a 25% chance that two “carriers” will have an affected child. And those cases can come as a shock to the parents, who tend to have no symptoms and no family history of disease.

This can be especially problematic in communities with high rates of those alleles. Consider Tay-Sachs disease—a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder caused by a recessive genetic mutation. Around one in 25 members of the Ashkenazi Jewish population is a healthy carrier for Tay-Sachs. Screening would-be parents for those recessive genes can be helpful. Carrier screening efforts in the Jewish community, which have been running since the 1970s, have massively reduced cases of Tay-Sachs.

Expanded carrier screening takes things further. Instead of screening for certain high-risk alleles in at-risk populations, there’s an option to test for a wide array of diseases in prospective parents and egg and sperm donors. The companies offering these screens “started out with 100 genes, and now some of them go up to 2,000,” Sara Levene, genetics counsellor at Guided Genetics, said at the meeting. “It’s becoming a bit of an arms race amongst labs, to be honest.”

There are benefits to expanded carrier screening. In most cases, the results are reassuring. And if something is flagged, prospective parents have options; they can often opt for additional testing to get more information about a particular pregnancy, for example, or choose to use other donor eggs or sperm to get pregnant. But there are also downsides. For a start, the tests can’t entirely rule out the risk of genetic disease.

Earlier this week, the BBC reported news of a sperm donor who had unwittingly passed on to at least 197 children in Europe a genetic mutation that dramatically increased the risk of cancer. Some of those children have already died.

It’s a tragic case. That donor had passed screening checks. The (dominant) mutation appears to have occurred in his testes, affecting around 20% of his sperm. It wouldn’t have shown up in a screen for recessive alleles, or even a blood test.

Even recessive diseases can be influenced by many genes, some of which won’t be included in the screen. And the screens don’t account for other factors that could influence a person’s risk of disease, such as epigenetics, microbiome, or even lifestyle.

“There’s always a 3% to 4% chance [of having] a child with a medical issue regardless of the screening performed,” said Jackson Kirkman-Brown, professor of reproductive biology at the University of Birmingham, at the meeting.

The tests can also cause stress. As soon as a clinician even mentions expanded carrier screening, it adds to the mental load of the patient, said Kirkman-Brown: “We’re saying this is another piece of information you need to worry about.”

People can also feel pressured to undergo expanded carrier screening even when they are ambivalent about it, said Heidi Mertes, a medical ethicist at Ghent University. “Once the technology is there, people feel like if they don’t take this opportunity up, then they are kind of doing something wrong or missing out,” she said.

My takeaway from the presentations was that while expanded carrier screening can be useful, especially for people from populations with known genetic risks, it won’t be for everyone.

I also worry that, as with the genetic tests offered by Nucleus, its availability gives the impression that it is possible to have a “perfect” baby—even if that only means “free from disease.” The truth is that there’s a lot about reproduction that we can’t control.

The decision to undergo expanded carrier screening is a personal choice. But as Mertes noted at the meeting: “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

We’re learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies

It has started to get really wintry here in London over the last few days. The mornings are frosty, the wind is biting, and it’s already dark by the time I pick my kids up from school. The darkness in particular has got me thinking about vitamin D, a.k.a. the sunshine vitamin.

At a checkup a few years ago, a doctor told me I was deficient in vitamin D. But he wouldn’t write me a prescription for supplements, simply because, as he put it, everyone in the UK is deficient. Putting the entire population on vitamin D supplements would be too expensive for the country’s national health service, he told me.

But supplementation—whether covered by a health-care provider or not—can be important. As those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere spend fewer of our waking hours in sunlight, let’s consider the importance of vitamin D.

Yes, it is important for bone health. But recent research is also uncovering surprising new insights into how the vitamin might influence other parts of our bodies, including our immune systems and heart health.

Vitamin D was discovered just over 100 years ago, when health professionals were looking for ways to treat what was then called “the English disease.” Today, we know that rickets, a weakening of bones in children, is caused by vitamin D deficiency. And vitamin D is best known for its importance in bone health.

That’s because it helps our bodies absorb calcium. Our bones are continually being broken down and rebuilt, and they need calcium for that rebuilding process. Without enough calcium, bones can become weak and brittle. (Depressingly, rickets is still a global health issue, which is why there is global consensus that infants should receive a vitamin D supplement at least until they are one year old.)

In the decades since then, scientists have learned that vitamin D has effects beyond our bones. There’s some evidence to suggest, for example, that being deficient in vitamin D puts people at risk of high blood pressure. Daily or weekly supplements can help those individuals lower their blood pressure.

A vitamin D deficiency has also been linked to a greater risk of “cardiovascular events” like heart attacks, although it’s not clear whether supplements can reduce this risk; the evidence is pretty mixed.

Vitamin D appears to influence our immune health, too. Studies have found a link between low vitamin D levels and incidence of the common cold, for example. And other research has shown that vitamin D supplements can influence the way our genes make proteins that play important roles in the way our immune systems work.

We don’t yet know exactly how these relationships work, however. And, unfortunately, a recent study that assessed the results of 37 clinical trials found that overall, vitamin D supplements aren’t likely to stop you from getting an “acute respiratory infection.”

Other studies have linked vitamin D levels to mental health, pregnancy outcomes, and even how long people survive after a cancer diagnosis. It’s tantalizing to imagine that a cheap supplement could benefit so many aspects of our health.

But, as you might have gathered if you’ve got this far, we’re not quite there yet. The evidence on the effects of vitamin D supplementation for those various conditions is mixed at best.

In fairness to researchers, it can be difficult to run a randomized clinical trial for vitamin D supplements. That’s because most of us get the bulk of our vitamin D from sunlight. Our skin converts UVB rays into a form of the vitamin that our bodies can use. We get it in our diets, too, but not much. (The main sources are oily fish, egg yolks, mushrooms, and some fortified cereals and milk alternatives.)

The standard way to measure a person’s vitamin D status is to look at blood levels of 25-hydroxycholecalciferol (25(OH)D), which is formed when the liver metabolizes vitamin D. But not everyone can agree on what the “ideal” level is.

Even if everyone did agree on a figure, it isn’t obvious how much vitamin D a person would need to consume to reach this target, or how much sunlight exposure it would take. One complicating factor is that people respond to UV rays in different ways—a lot of that can depend on how much melanin is in your skin. Similarly, if you’re sitting down to a meal of oily fish and mushrooms and washing it down with a glass of fortified milk, it’s hard to know how much more you might need.

There is more consensus on the definition of vitamin D deficiency, though. (It’s a blood level below 30 nanomoles per liter, in case you were wondering.) And until we know more about what vitamin D is doing in our bodies, our focus should be on avoiding that.

For me, that means topping up with a supplement. The UK government advises everyone in the country to take a 10-microgram vitamin D supplement over autumn and winter. That advice doesn’t factor in my age, my blood levels, or the amount of melanin in my skin. But it’s all I’ve got for now.

Cloning isn’t just for celebrity pets like Tom Brady’s dog

This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a pit bull mix that died in 2023.

Brady’s announcement follows those of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Barbra Streisand, who also famously cloned their pet dogs. But some believe there are better ways to make use of cloning technologies.

While the pampered pooches of the rich and famous may dominate this week’s headlines, cloning technologies are also being used to diversify the genetic pools of inbred species and potentially bring other animals back from the brink of extinction.

Cloning itself isn’t new. The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, Dolly the sheep, was born in the 1990s. The technology has been used in livestock breeding over the decades since.

Say you’ve got a particularly large bull, or a cow that has an especially high milk yield. Those animals are valuable. You could selectively breed for those kinds of characteristics. Or you could clone the original animals—essentially creating genetic twins.

Scientists can take some of the animals’ cells, freeze them, and store them in a biobank. That opens the option to clone them in the future. It’s possible to thaw those cells, remove the DNA-containing nuclei of the cells, and insert them into donor egg cells.

Those donor egg cells, which come from another animal of the same species, have their own nuclei removed. So it’s a case of swapping out the DNA. The resulting cell is stimulated and grown in the lab until it starts to look like an embryo. Then it is transferred to the uterus of a surrogate animal—which eventually gives birth to a clone.

There are a handful of companies offering to clone pets. Viagen, which claims to have “cloned more animals than anyone else on Earth,” will clone a dog or cat for $50,000. That’s the company that cloned Streisand’s pet dog Samantha, twice.

This week, Colossal Biosciences—the “de-extinction” company that claims to have resurrected the dire wolf and created a “woolly mouse” as a precursor to reviving the woolly mammoth—announced that it had acquired Viagen, but that Viagen will “continue to operate under its current leadership.”

Pet cloning is controversial, for a few reasons. The companies themselves point out that, while the cloned animal will be a genetic twin of the original animal, it won’t be identical. One issue is mitochondrial DNA—a tiny fraction of DNA that sits outside the nucleus and is inherited from the mother. The cloned animal may inherit some of this from the surrogate.

Mitochondrial DNA is unlikely to have much of an impact on the animal itself. More important are the many, many factors thought to shape an individual’s personality and temperament. “It’s the old nature-versus-nurture question,” says Samantha Wisely, a conservation geneticist at the University of Florida. After all, human identical twins are never carbon copies of each other. Anyone who clones a pet expecting a like-for-like reincarnation is likely to be disappointed.

And some animal welfare groups are opposed to the practice of pet cloning. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) described it as “a horror show,” and the UK’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) says that “there is no justification for cloning animals for such trivial purposes.” 

But there are other uses for cloning technology that are arguably less trivial. Wisely has long been interested in diversifying the gene pool of the critically endangered black-footed ferret, for example.

Today, there are around 10,000 black-footed ferrets that have been captively bred from only seven individuals, says Wisely. That level of inbreeding isn’t good for any species—it tends to leave organisms at risk of poor health. They are less able to reproduce or adapt to changes in their environment.

Wisely and her colleagues had access to frozen tissue samples taken from two other ferrets. Along with colleagues at not-for-profit Revive and Restore, the team created clones of those two individuals. The first clone, Elizabeth Ann, was born in 2020. Since then, other clones have been born, and the team has started breeding the cloned animals with the descendants of the other seven ferrets, says Wisely.

The same approach has been used to clone the endangered Przewalski’s horse, using decades-old tissue samples stored by the San Diego Zoo. It’s too soon to predict the impact of these efforts. Researchers are still evaluating the cloned ferrets and their offspring to see if they behave like typical animals and could survive in the wild.

Even this practice is not without its critics. Some have pointed out that cloning alone will not save any species. After all, it doesn’t address the habitat loss or human-wildlife conflict that is responsible for the endangerment of these animals in the first place. And there will always be detractors who accuse people who clone animals of “playing God.” 

For all her involvement in cloning endangered ferrets, Wisely tells me she would not consider cloning her own pets. She currently has three rescue dogs, a rescue cat, and “geriatric chickens.” “I love them all dearly,” she says. “But there are a lot of rescue animals out there that need homes.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Here’s why we don’t have a cold vaccine. Yet.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the season of the sniffles. As the weather turns, we’re all spending more time indoors. The kids have been back at school for a couple of months. And cold germs are everywhere.

My youngest started school this year, and along with artwork and seedlings, she has also been bringing home lots of lovely bugs to share with the rest of her family. As she coughed directly into my face for what felt like the hundredth time, I started to wonder if there was anything I could do to stop this endless cycle of winter illnesses. We all got our flu jabs a month ago. Why couldn’t we get a vaccine to protect us against the common cold, too?

Scientists have been working on this for decades. It turns out that creating a cold vaccine is hard. Really hard.

But not impossible. There’s still hope. Let me explain.

Technically, colds are infections that affect your nose and throat, causing symptoms like sneezing, coughing, and generally feeling like garbage. Unlike some other infections,—covid-19, for example—they aren’t defined by the specific virus that causes them.

That’s because there are a lot of viruses that cause colds, including rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and even seasonal coronaviruses (they don’t all cause covid!). Within those virus families, there are many different variants.

Take rhinoviruses, for example. These viruses are thought to be behind most colds. They’re human viruses—over the course of evolution, they have become perfectly adapted to infecting us, rapidly multiplying in our noses and airways to make us sick. There are around 180 rhinovirus variants, says Gary McLean, a molecular immunologist at Imperial College London in the UK.

Once you factor in the other cold-causing viruses, there are around 280 variants all told. That’s 280 suspects behind the cough that my daughter sprayed into my face. It’s going to be really hard to make a vaccine that will offer protection against all of them.

The second challenge lies in the prevalence of those variants.

Scientists tailor flu and covid vaccines to whatever strain happens to be circulating. Months before flu season starts, the World Health Organization advises countries on which strains their vaccines should protect against. Early recommendations for the Northern Hemisphere can be based on which strains seem to be dominant in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa.

That approach wouldn’t work for the common cold, because all those hundreds of variants are circulating all the time, says McLean.

That’s not to say that people haven’t tried to make a cold vaccine. There was a flurry of interest in the 1960s and ’70s, when scientists made valiant efforts to develop vaccines for the common cold. Sadly, they all failed. And we haven’t made much progress since then.

In 2022, a team of researchers reviewed all the research that had been published up to that year. They only identified one clinical trial—and it was conducted back in 1965.

Interest has certainly died down since then, too. Some question whether a cold vaccine is even worth the effort. After all, most colds don’t require much in the way of treatment and don’t last more than a week or two. There are many, many more dangerous viruses out there we could be focusing on.

And while cold viruses do mutate and evolve, no one really expects them to cause the next pandemic, says McLean. They’ve evolved to cause mild disease in humans—something they’ve been doing successfully for a long, long time. Flu viruses—which can cause serious illness, disability, or even death—pose a much bigger risk, so they probably deserve more attention.

But colds are still irritating, disruptive, and potentially harmful. Rhinoviruses are considered to be the leading cause of human infectious disease. They can cause pneumonia in children and older adults. And once you add up doctor visits, medication, and missed work, the economic cost of colds is pretty hefty: a 2003 study put it at $40 billion per year for the US alone.

So it’s reassuring that we needn’t abandon all hope: Some scientists are making progress! McLean and his colleagues are working on ways to prepare the immune systems of people with asthma and lung diseases to potentially protect them from cold viruses. And a team at Emory University has developed a vaccine that appears to protect monkeys from around a third of rhinoviruses.

There’s still a long way to go. Don’t expect a cold vaccine to materialize in the next five years, at least. “We’re not quite there yet,” says Michael Boeckh, an infectious-disease researcher at Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington. “But will it at some point happen? Possibly.”

At the end of our Zoom call, perhaps after reading the disappointed expression on my sniffling, cold-riddled face (yes, I did end up catching my daughter’s cold), McLean told me he hoped he was “positive enough.” He admitted that he used to be more optimistic about a cold vaccine. But he hasn’t given up hope. He’s even running a trial of a potential new vaccine in people, although he wouldn’t reveal the details.

“It could be done,” he said.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.