So ist diese Website aufgebaut
Methodik
Was in ein Protokoll einfließt, wie Belege bewertet werden, was wir nicht veröffentlichen und wie du erkennen kannst, wie alt eine bestimmte Aussage ist.
Evidence levels
The most important label on this site. Every relevant record carries exactly one of these, and the definition is fixed:
| Level | What it means | What it does not mean |
|---|---|---|
| Approved treatment | A national medicines regulator has authorised at least one product for this use. | That it is available in your country, affordable, or suitable for any particular person. |
| Clinical research | Being tested in people in registered clinical trials. | That it works. Most treatments entering trials never reach approval. |
| Preclinical research | Tested in cells and in animals only. | That it will work in humans. Animal results frequently do not carry over. |
| Laboratory research | Demonstrated at the bench. | That anyone is developing it as a treatment. |
| Future possibility | Discussed in the literature as a direction. | A prediction, a timeline, or a programme in progress. |
What a record contains
Every record, whatever its kind, has the same skeleton: a one-sentence direct answer, a plain-language explanation, a technical summary, structured facts with a source attached to each, the full article body, common questions, a source list, an author, and dates. Kind-specific structured fields hang off that — regulatory status and route of administration for a treatment, phase and registry identifier for a trial, cytogenetic location and protein product for a gene, and so on.
How records are linked
Relationships are stored explicitly, not inferred from text. A treatment record is joined to the disease it targets, the technology it uses, the gene it edits, the company developing it and the trials testing it. Those links are traversable in both directions, which is why every page can show what connects to it without a separate editorial step. The site currently holds 358 such connections across 365 records.
Sources we prefer, in order
- Regulators: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, the UK MHRA and equivalents.
- Trial registries, principally ClinicalTrials.gov (U.S. National Library of Medicine).
- Peer-reviewed primary literature — Nature, Science, Cell, the New England Journal of Medicine and their specialist siblings — accessed through PubMed.
- Public genomic references: NCBI Gene, Ensembl, HGNC, OMIM, and the National Human Genome Research Institute.
- Company regulatory filings and official announcements, for company facts only.
- Established science journalism, for context and for news — never as the sole source for a factual claim that a primary source could settle.
Numbers and units
Figures are given with the units and the period they refer to, and prices are labelled as list prices in a named currency and country rather than presented as what anyone actually pays. Where a source publishes a range we give the range rather than picking a point inside it. Where a value is genuinely not published, the field says so — an empty cell on this site means "not recorded in the sources we hold", and we say which, rather than showing a zero.
How stale can a page be?
Every record shows its last-updated date, and the AI assistant and API expose the same date. Trial status, regulatory status and company pipelines are the fastest-moving fields on the site and the most likely to lag; for those, the registry, the regulator and the company's own filings are authoritative and we say so on the page. This is a compiled reference, not a live feed, and it does not pretend to be one.
What we will not publish
- Fabricated or AI-written news presented as reporting.
- AI-generated likenesses of real people. Scientist pages use abstract artwork by design.
- Reproduced copyrighted journal articles. We summarise and link.
- Dosing guidance, eligibility judgements, or anything that could be read as clinical direction.
- Claims about an individual company's prospects, or any recommendation to buy or sell a security.
Illustrations
The artwork across this site is generated imagery, produced for the Atlas and labelled as illustration wherever it appears next to scientific content. It is there to give a page visual structure and mood — it is not a photograph, not a micrograph, and not a literal depiction of molecular structure. Where the shape of a molecule genuinely matters, the page uses a drawn schematic diagram and says what it is showing.