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 Many important research questions and many of the challenges facing society today increasingly require interdisciplinary approaches. New advances in science, engineering, social sciences and humanities, as well as the development and adoption of new technologies, require collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The Royal Academy o…

The Global Burden of Disease AMR project will be collecting data from all over the world to create a map of disease and deaths caused by drug-resistant infections, according to a news release from UK-based Wellcome, which announced that it will be investing £2.4 million ($3.2 million US) in the project as part of its efforts to address the AMR thre…

Professor Nelson is currently Chief Executive of EPSRC and has agreed to serve an additional six months beyond his existing term to enable a smooth transition to the new organisation when it comes into existence on 1 April 2018.Executive Chairs will be crucial to the ambition for UKRI to be a world-leading research and innovation organisation. Each…

Early diagnosis matters, and it can be done using cheap tools that are already widely available in the developing world, said Andre Ibawi, technical officer at the WHO. He said that people have a much better chance of survival if they find out they have cancer at early stages of the disease, so the priority for policy needs to be on promoting early…

The five key areas that they identified are:Fragility as the new development frontierThe shrinking size of the overall poverty gapCooperation of middle-income countries in tackling global challengesCompetitive engagement with China, andRealistic expectations for private sector mobilisation in development spheresA short analysis of each area is avai…

The number of limbs amputated because of diabetes is at an all-time high of 20 each day in England alone. Intense research around the world is being carried out to discover new treatments that could help avoid such life-changing operations and reduce medical costs for society.A study led by the universities of Exeter and Bath, and published in the …

The largest data repository of any parasitic disease in the world, it includes 7.8 million blood samples from more than 30,000 locations in 43 countries.The open access dataset was collected and analysed by KEMRI-Wellcome Trust researchers Professor Bob Snow, Abdisalan Noor and colleagues based in Kenya, and is the result of over 20 years of resear…

Not luck of the draw exactly but it was a random mutation in a convenient host that led to the discovery of a gene responsible for a fungal disease that wrecks up to one fifth of the world’s cereal production, or hundreds of millions of tonnes of crops. Near identical genes are also present in the fungi that cause vegetables to rot, trees to die an…

The Call to Action event in Berlin on October 12 and 13 was organized by the Wellcome Trust, in partnership with the UK, Thai, and Ghanaian Governments, and the United Nations Foundation.Analysis by Wellcome and the UN Foundation shows that while 151 of 195 countries are developing an action plan to tackle drug-resistant infections, only half addre…

Energy-saving Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) could help meet demand for wireless communications without affecting the quality of light or environmental benefits they deliver, new research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has shown.Although it has long been known that LEDs can be ‘piggy-backed’ to transmit data …

Scientists attending a recent meeting of the American Society for Microbiology reported they had uncovered a highly disturbing trend. They revealed that bacteria containing a gene known as mcr-1 – which confers resistance to the antibiotic colistin – had spread round the world at an alarming rate since its original discovery 18 months earlier. In o…

The President of the General Assembly, Miroslav Lajčák, noted after the session on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) that genuine progress has been made across Africa, driving the continent towards a reality where all citizens benefit from growth and development, institutions and infrastructure are strong, and good governance is …

Collaboration between these three partners has been realised through a recently launched call “Joint WHO-AFRO/TDR/EDCTP Small Grants Scheme for implementation research on infectious diseases of poverty”, which will close on 30 November 2017."EDCTP is pleased to be able contribute to small start-up grants that would facilitate collaborations between…

The question of how to transform the food system to provide healthy diets for all, sustainably, is a complex one, for which there is no quick-fix.  This challenge is compounded by the fact that the food system is also highly dynamic and continually evolving under the influence of a large number of both local and global drivers.  This means that whi…

The world is not going to be carbon-free any time soon: that much is clear. Developed and developing countries alike rely on fossil fuels for transport, industry and power, all of which release CO2 into the atmosphere. But as sea levels rise, ‘unprecedented’ weather events become commonplace and the polar ice caps melt, how can we balance our use o…