Dr. Botond Roska, a former student and visiting professor at Semmelweis University, has received the António Champalimaud Vision Award for his achievements in developing optogenetic therapy to restore vision. He shared the award, one of the world’s most prestigious honors in vision research, with French American ophthalmologist and researcher José-Alain Sahel. The world-renowned researcher, who lives in Switzerland, has collaborated with Semmelweis University for 15 years and believes this joint work has contributed to his achievements. In an interview with our website, he also discussed the current state of research into treating certain forms of blindness, when a therapy that partially restores vision could become more widely available, and the results of a five-year research project conducted jointly with the university that has just concluded.

A growing surplus of refinery sulfur could find a new use in asphalt production, reducing reliance on petroleum-based bitumen and lowering costs. But a new academic review highlights unanswered questions about emissions, human exposure and long-term health implications, calling for safer formulations and life-cycle assessment of sulfur-modified asphalt.

Houston Methodist researchers have been awarded a five-year, $3.28 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the brain controls bladder storage and emptying in people with underactive bladder, a condition that can make urination difficult or impossible and leave patients with few effective treatment options.

ATP-induced cell death (AICD) is an operational conceptual framework describing the associations between pathological extracellular ATP accumulation, excessive purinergic stimulation, disrupted ATP homeostasis and diverse cell-death outcomes. This review summarizes recent evidence on the molecular mechanisms of AICD, including extracellular ATP–purinergic receptor signaling, ionic and membrane disturbances, inflammasome and caspase activation, mitochondrial dysfunction, redox imbalance, and the context-dependent convergence of these pathways on multiple forms of cell death. The directness and strength of gene-level evidence are also assessed using an ordinal evidence-grading framework that classifies the evidence for the 38 AICD-Core genes as direct experimental, indirect, context-dependent, mechanistically supportive, or currently insufficient. These mechanistic analyses, as well as gene-level analyses, are discussed in relation to the existing datasets in ATPexGen, which contains 38 AICD-Core and 216 AICD-Extended genes and provides a searchable and downloadable resource for the field of AICD research. The review also addresses gaps in current evidence, limitations of curation processes, and priorities for experimental validation and database development moving forward.