This Lancet Global Health Commission advances addresses SDG 3 directly, and SDGs 1, 2, 4, 5, 8 and 10 indirectly, by comprehensively demonstrating how improving eye health by treating and preventing vision impairment and vision loss can not only advance SDG 3—improving health and wellbeing for all—but also contribute to poverty reduction, zero hunger, quality education, gender equality, and decent work and economic growth. The findings of this report frame eye health as a development issue and highlight that, with a growing ageing population globally, urgent and concerted action is needed to meet unmet eye health needs globally, including incorporating equitable eye care into countries’ universal health coverage plans.
HBV evolution and genetic variability: Impact on prevention, treatment and development of antivirals
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) poses a major global health burden with 260 million people being chronically infected and 890,000 dying annually from complications in the course of the infection.
Background: In 2016, of the estimated 257 million people living with chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection worldwide, only a small proportion was diagnosed and treated.
A Research Paper on obesity, in the context of SDGs 3, 9, and 11, focusing specifically on the role of multi-level and multi-component interventions addressing healthy nutrition, physical activity, and education to mitigate the rising epidemic.
An Article in support of SDG 3, showing that the age-adjusted prevalence of blindness has reduced over the past three decades, yet due to population growth, progress is not keeping pace with needs and vision impairment remains an urgent and increasingly important public health priority.
This paper supports SDG 3 by analysing the current national action plans of ten ASEAN countries and their alignment with the Global Action Plan on antimicrobial resistance, highlighting five key themes: policy design, implementation tools, monitoring and evaluation, sustainability, and One Health engagement.
Building and Environment will host a series of free webinars on COVID-19 Control. The second webinar of the series will feature 2 presentations from experts in the field on the following topics: COVID-19 and indoor and outdoor sports, presented by Bert Blocken, Professor of Civil Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands & KU Leuven, Belgium. Efficient reduction of airborne transmission by advanced ventilation, presented by Arsen K. Melikov, Professor of Ventilation and Air Distribution, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark.
A call for research into how planetary health, specifically public health, is linked to climate change and how humans are changing the planet. Climate change and biodiversity loss are impacting human immunity and disease outbreaks
AMPK plays a key role in both diabetes mellitus (DM) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) - targeting this biomolecule and understanding the relationship with DM provides new hope for the treatment of AD
Cystic fibrosis (CF) is caused by a mutation of the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator (CFTR) gene, which disrupts an ion channel involved in hydration maintenance via anion homeostasis. Nearly 5% of CF patients possess one or more copies of the G542X allele, which results in a stop codon at residue 542, preventing full-length CFTR protein synthesis. Identifying small-molecule modulators of mutant CFTR biosynthesis that affect the readthrough of this and other premature termination codons to synthesize a fully functional CFTR protein represents a novel target area of drug discovery. We describe the implementation and integration for large-scale screening of a homogeneous, 1536-well functional G542X-CFTR readthrough assay. The assay uses HEK 293 cells engineered to overexpress the G542X-CFTR mutant, whose functional activity is monitored with a membrane potential dye. Cells are co-incubated with a CFTR amplifier and CFTR corrector to maximize mRNA levels and trafficking of CFTR to the cell surface. Compounds that allow translational readthrough and synthesis of functional CFTR chloride channels are reflected by changes in membrane potential in response to cAMP stimulation with forskolin and CFTR channel potentiation with genistein. Assay statistics yielded Z′ values of 0.69 ± 0.06. As further evidence of its suitability for high-throughput screening, we completed automated screening of approximately 666,000 compounds, identifying 7761 initial hits. Following secondary and tertiary assays, we identified 188 confirmed hit compounds with low and submicromolar potencies. Thus, this approach takes advantage of a phenotypic screen with high-throughput scalability to identify new small-molecule G542X-CFTR readthrough modulators.
