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JAPAN – Potential drug for treating chronic pain with few side effects.

AUSTRALIA – Fellowship supports search for new disease treatments.

TAIWAN – A novel platform for neurodegenerative disease studies: Applying photocontrollable probe to induce pathological proteins into amyloid fibers in live cells.

TAIWAN – CLEC5A is critical in innate immunity against bacterial infections.

SINGAPORE – Singapore scientists uncover how neural stem cells are activated intrinsically by spindle matrix proteins.

SINGAPORE – NUS establishes additive manufacturing facilities for biomedical applications.

SINGAPORE & GERMANY – Breakthrough immunotherapy for Chronic Hepatitis B virus infection.

SINGAPORE, HONG KONG & SOUTH KOREA – First in Asia - Launch of multi-centre lung cancer research platform.

SINGAPORE & TAIWAN – ASLAN Pharmaceuticals collaborates with Academia Sinica’s Genomic Research Centre.

GERMANY – ASIT biotech announces follow-up study of Phase I/IIa clinical trial for house dust mite rhinitis.

USA – Test uses nanotechnology to quickly diagnose Zika virus.

Bacteriophages or phages are viruses that infect bacteria and are increasingly used to control bacterial infections. We develop a reaction–diffusion model coupling the interactive dynamic of phages and bacteria with an epidemiological bacteria-borne disease model. For the submodel without phage absorption, the basic reproduction number ${{ℛ}}_0$ is computed. The disease-free equilibrium (DFE) is shown to be globally asymptotically stable whenever ${{ℛ}}_0$ is less than one, while a unique globally asymptotically endemic equilibrium is proven whenever ${{ℛ}}_0$ exceeds one. In the presence of phage absorption, the above stated classical condition based on ${{ℛ}}_0$, as the average number of secondary human infections produced by susceptible/lysogen bacteria during their entire lifespan, is no longer sufficient to guarantee the global stability of the DFE. We thus derive an additional threshold ${{𝒩}}_0$, which is the average offspring number of lysogen bacteria produced by one infected human during the phage–bacteria interactions, and prove that the DFE is globally asymptotically stable whenever both ${{ℛ}}_0$ and ${{𝒩}}_0$ are under unity, and infections persist uniformly whenever ${{ℛ}}_0$ is greater than one. Finally, the discrete counterpart of the continuous partial differential equation model is derived by constructing a nonstandard finite difference scheme which is dynamically consistent. This consistency is shown by constructing suitable discrete Lyapunov functionals thanks to which the global stability results for the continuous model are replicated. This scheme is implemented in MatLab platform and used to assess the impact of spatial distribution of phages, on the dynamic of bacterial infections.

A competition between bacteria and innate immune system of invertebrates is described by means of a pair of nonlinear reaction-diffusion PDE's, with constant coefficients. In the system it is also considered the presence of the Quorum Sensing (Q.S.) phenomenon. The qualitative properties of the associated kinetic system have been studied. The local stability properties have been proved for some biological meaningful solutions. Some results on the linear stability properties of the solutions of the PDE model with diffusion have also been given.