The Internationalisation of Tobacco Control, 1950-2010.

This article explores the internationalisation of tobacco control as a case study in the history of international health regulation. Contrary to the existing literature on the topic, it argues that the history of international anti-smoking efforts is longer and richer than the making of the World Health Organisation's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in the early twenty-first century. It thereby echoes the point made by other scholars about the importance of history when making sense of contemporary global health. Specifically, the article shows how the internationalisation of tobacco control started in the 1950s through informal contacts between scientists working on cancer research and how these initial interactions were followed by a growing number of more formal initiatives, from the World Conferences on Tobacco or Health to the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use. Rather than arranging these efforts in a linear narrative of progress culminating with the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, we take anthropological claims about global health's uneven terrain seriously and portray a history of international tobacco control marked by ruptures and discontinuities. Specifically, we identify three successive periods, with each of them characterised by specific understandings of international action, tobacco control expertise, advocacy networks and funding strategies

Ethics governance, modernity and human beings' capacity to reflect and decide---a genealogy of medical research ethics in the UK and Singapore.

This PhD thesis explores how bioethics has reconfigured the way we think about, discuss and govern the scientific and medical use of the human body in the UK and Singapore. The thesis starts by analysing the language, knowledge, institutions and mechanisms that allowed people to render intelligible and organise the medical use of the human body before the emergence of bioethics. Then, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose, the thesis examines and compares the conceptual, material and political conditions that made it possible, in both the UK and Singapore, to identify the medical use of human tissue as a 'problem of ethics' needing to be assessed and regulated. The thesis furthermore discusses a key component of bioethics - the procedure of informed consent - and analyzes how its use is reconfiguring subjectivities and contemporary notions of citizenship in both countries. On the basis of a systematic content analysis of key bioethics' journals from 1960 to the present and over twenty in-depth interviews with key experts in the field, the thesis makes two important findings. First, it explains how, in the UK, bioethical governance was developed to protect human beings from the dangers of modern science, while in Singapore it was introduced as part of the country's drive to be a modern and developed nation. Second, it argues that bioethical governance has brought into being, through its language, categories, procedures and experts, a new figure of the subject and citizen: the human being capable of reflecting and deciding on his or her own existence. These findings make an original contribution to (1) the sociological study of bioethics and the bioethical governance of the life sciences and (2) the literature on govern-mentality

Novel dimeric DOTA-coupled peptidic Y1-receptor antagonists for targeting of neuropeptide Y receptor-expressing cancers

ABSTRACT

The changing climates of global health.

The historical trajectories of three crises have converged in the 2020s: the COVID-19 pandemic, rising inequality and the climate crisis. Global health as an organising logic is being transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic. We point to an emerging consensus that the triple threats of global heating, zoonoses and worsening, often racialised inequalities, will need to be met by models of cooperation, equitable partnership and accountability that do not sustain exploitative logic of economic growth. Health governance is challenged to reconsider sustainability and justice in terms of how local and global, domestic and transnational, chronic and infectious, human and non-human are interdependent. In this article, we discuss their intersection and suggest that a new set of organising ideals, institutions and norms will need to emerge from their conjunction if a just and liveable world is to remain a possibility for humans and their cohabitants. Future health governance will need to integrate pandemic preparedness, racial justice, inequality and more-than-human life in a new architecture of global health. Such an agenda might be premised on solidarities that reach across national, class, spatial and species divisions, acknowledge historical debts and affirm mutual interdependencies

In-Vivo Biodistribution and Safety of 99mTc-LLP2A-HYNIC in Canine Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

Theranostic agents are critical for improving the diagnosis and treatment of non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL). The peptidomimetic LLP2A is a novel peptide receptor radiotherapy candidate for treating NHL that expresses the activated α4β1 integrin. Tumor-bearing dogs are an excellent model of human NHL with similar clinical characteristics, behavior, and compressed clinical course. Canine in vivo imaging studies will provide valuable biodistribution and affinity information that reflects a diverse clinical population of lymphoma. This may also help to determine potential dose-limiting radiotoxicity to organs in human clinical trials. To validate this construct in a naturally occurring model of NHL, we performed in-vivo molecular targeted imaging and biodistribution in 3 normal dogs and 5 NHL bearing dogs. 99mTc-LLP2A-HYNIC-PEG and 99mTc-LLP2A-HYNIC were successfully synthesized and had very good labeling efficiency and radiochemical purity. 99mTc-LLP2A-HYNIC and 99mTc-LLP2A-HYNIC-PEG had biodistribution in keeping with their molecular size, with 99mTc-LLP2A-HYNIC-PEG remaining longer in the circulation, having higher tissue uptake, and having more activity in the liver compared to 99mTc-LLP2A-HYNIC. 99mTc-LLP2A-HYNIC was mainly eliminated through the kidneys with some residual activity. Radioactivity was reduced to near-background levels at 6 hours after injection. In NHL dogs, tumor showed moderately increased activity over background, with tumor activity in B-cell lymphoma dogs decreasing after chemotherapy. This compound is promising in the development of targeted drug-delivery radiopharmaceuticals and may contribute to translational work in people affected by non-Hodgkin lymphoma

Estrogen Alters the Splicing of Type 1 Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone Receptor in Breast Cancer Cells

Hormonal stress response is associated with the pathogenesis of disease, including cancer. The role of the stress hormone CRH (corticotropin-releasing hormone) in breast cancer is complex, and its abundance and biological activity may be modulated by estrogen. In the estrogen receptor–positive (ER+) malignant mammary epithelial cell line MCF7, CRH activated numerous kinases and downstream effectors, at least some of which were mediated by the CRH receptor type 1 (CRH-R1). CRH also increased the transcription of many genes that encode effectors, transcriptional targets, or regulators associated with estrogen signaling. Estrogen increased the abundance of the mRNA encoding CRH-R2 and an alternative splice variant encoding CRH-R1 in which exon 12 was deleted [CRH-R1(Δ12)]. Estrogen inhibited the expression SRSF6, which encodes serine/arginine-rich splicing factor 55 (SRp55). An increase in CRH-R1(Δ12), in response to either estrogen or SRp55 knockdown, dampened the cellular response to CRH and prevented its inhibitory effects on cell invasion. SRp55 knockdown also induced additional splicing events within exons 9 to 12 of CRH-R1, whereas overexpression of SRp55 prevented estrogen-induced generation of CRH-R1(Δ12). ER+ breast tumors had increased CRH-R2 and CRH-R1(Δ12) mRNA abundance, which was associated with decreased abundance of the mRNA encoding SRp55, compared with the amounts in ER– tumors, suggesting that estrogen contributes to the pathophysiology of ER+ breast cancer by altering CRH receptor diversity and disrupting CRH-mediated signaling

Of Neoliberalism and Global Health:Human Capital, Market Failure and Sin/Social Taxes

This article tells a different but equally important story about neoliberalism and global health than the narrative on structural adjustment policies usually found in the literature. Rather than focus on macroeconomic structural adjustment policies, this story draws our attention to microeconomic taxation policies on tobacco, alcohol and sugar now widely recognised as the best strategy to control the global non-communicable disease epidemic. Structural adjustment policies are the product of the shift from statist to market-based development models, which was brought about by neoliberal thinkers like Peter Blau and Deepak Lal. In contrast, taxation policies are the result of a different epistemological rupture in international development: the move from economies and physical capital to people and human capital, advocated by Gary Becker and others. This move was part of wider change, which saw Chicago School economists, under the influence of rational choice theory, redefine the object of their discipline, from the study of markets to individual choices. It was this concern with people and their choices that made it possible for Becker and others to identify the importance of price for the demand for tobacco, alcohol and sugar. The same concern also made it easier for them to recognise that there were inefficiencies in the tobacco, alcohol and sugar markets that required government intervention. This story, I suggest, shows that structural adjustment policies and pro-market ideology do not exhaust the relationship between neoliberalism and global health and should not monopolise how we, as political and social scientists, conceive it