The African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) has a new leader and a new strategic vision.

Catherine Kyobutungi leads an organisation with a broad mandate to generate evidence and strengthen research capacity in Africa. As Executive Director of the Nairobi-based African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) since Oct 1, 2017, she’s clear about her mission: “For me the important thing is that we are doing research not for the sake of research, but to generate policy-relevant evidence while building credible profiles to be able to speak and be listened to where it matters. So that people making policy decisions have the best evidence available to them and they think about it and they look for it, and the evidence actually goes into policies.” Ibrahim Abubakar, Director of University College London’s Institute for Global Health, UK, welcomes her appointment.

The global nephrology community recognises the need for a cohesive plan to address the problem of chronic kidney disease (CKD). In July, 2016, the International Society of Nephrology hosted a CKD summit of more than 85 people with diverse expertise and professional backgrounds from around the globe. The purpose was to identify and prioritise key activities for the next 5–10 years in the domains of clinical care, research, and advocacy and to create an action plan and performance framework based on ten themes: strengthen CKD surveillance; tackle major risk factors for CKD; reduce acute kidney injury—a special risk factor for CKD; enhance understanding of the genetic causes of CKD; establish better diagnostic methods in CKD; improve understanding of the natural course of CKD; assess and implement established treatment options in patients with CKD; improve management of symptoms and complications of CKD; develop novel therapeutic interventions to slow CKD progression and reduce CKD complications; and increase the quantity and quality of clinical trials in CKD.

The NHS Blood and Transplant Service has recently told the BBC that over the past 5 years more than 500 families in the UK have blocked organ donation from a deceased relative, despite them being on the organ donor register. In the USA, more than 117 000 people await an organ transplant, says a report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on the Opportunities for Organ Donor Intervention Research, published on Oct 10. The Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation reports that despite there being over 126 000 organ transplants each year across more than 100 countries, many patients remain on waiting lists.

Exploiting a gap in regulation, clinics offering risky, unproven stem-cell treatments are spreading across the world, as researchers and regulatory bodies call for action. Dara Mohammadi reports.

Smoking causes more than 7 million deaths each year1 and tobacco companies have known, since at least 1950, that their products are lethal and addictive. Now Philip Morris International (PMI) is committing nearly US$1 billion over 12 years to the Philip Morris Foundation for a Smoke-Free World that will “fund scientific research designed to eliminate the use of smoked tobacco around the globe”.2 In a Lancet Viewpoint in this issue, the Foundation’s President Derek Yach argues it will support “an unswerving focus…to improve public health and human wellbeing”.