In the long effort to understand disease at the level of individual cells, researchers have long been caught between two competing needs: the hunger for more data and the obligation to protect the patients from whom that data comes. A team has now built a system called SynCellNet that dissolves this tension by generating synthetic cells — artificial gene expression profiles that are statistically indistinguishable from real ones yet carry no patient information. Published in Nature, the work suggests that the scarcity and privacy constraints that have quietly slowed single-cell genomics resear