Destruction of rainforests through wildfires or deforestation may harm human health. As these forests disappear, we may be losing precious medicinal plants that hold treatments for various diseases.
Drug discovery can get an assist from what nature’s already devised.
Annie Spratt/Unsplash
As antibiotic resistance increases globally, the heat is on to find new alternatives to treat infections. Chemists can get a head start by looking at compounds produced in nature by fishes’ microbes.
Personalised medicine aims to tailor treatment according to each person’s genetic makeup.
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Using a large number of computers to screen TB drugs reduces the cost and time.
Collaborations between mathematicians, cancer biologists and clinical oncologists enable both rapid cost-effective testing of cancer drug combinations, and deeper understanding of cancer drug resistance.
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Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally. Mathematicians have joined the fight, developing models to both test cancer drug combinations and understand chemotherapy drug resistance.
Changes in climatic conditions have led to an increase in malaria in East Africa.
Adriane Ohanesia/Reuters
Malaria is a major public health problem that affects 106 countries globally. A rigorous and systematic approach to predict and control malaria transmission is needed.
What can a single person’s flu infection tell you about how the virus changes around the world?
Xue and Bloom
There is an increasing focus on alternative treatment strategies, developed to treat other diseases and conditions but re-purposed to tackle TB.
A father reads to his son while sitting under a mosquito net. Mosquitoes have undergone evolutionary changes due to long-lasting insecticide-treated nets.
Georgina Goodwin and Vestergaard Frandsen
Although there have been global efforts to eliminate parasites, some parasites and vectors will have survived attack because they have evolved resistance.
World Health Organisation director-general Margaret Chan at the launch of a new global campaign against antibiotic resistance.
Reuters/Pierre Albouy
More than 700,000 people die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections. The World Health Organisation is trying to end the age of ignorance to protect this global common good.
Associate Member, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Affiliate Associate Professor of Genome Sciences and Microbiology, University of Washington