Uveitis is an important cause of vision loss worldwide due to its sight-threatening complications, especially cystoid macular edema, as well as choroidal neovascularization, macular ischemia, cataract, and glaucoma. Systemic corticosteroids are the mainstay of therapy for noninfectious posterior uveitis; however, various systemic side effects can occur. Intravitreal medication achieves a therapeutic level in the vitreous while minimizing systemic complications and is thus used as an exciting alternative. Corticosteroids, antivascular endothelial growth factors, immunomodulators such as methotrexate and sirolimus, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are currently available for intravitreal therapy. This article reviews the existing literature for efficacy and safety of these various options for intravitreal drug therapy for the management of noninfectious uveitis (mainly intermediate, posterior, and panuveitis).

Mycobacterium abscessus is an emerging health risk to immunocompromised individuals and to people with pre-existing pulmonary conditions. As M. abscessus possesses multiple mechanisms of drug resistance, treatments of M. abscessus are of poor efficacy. Therefore, there is an urgent need for new therapeutic strategies targeting M. abscessus. We describe an experimental system for screening of compounds for their antimicrobial activity against intracellular M. abscessus using flow cytometry and imaging flow cytometry. The assay allows simultaneous analysis of multiple parameters, such as proportion of infected host cells, bacterial load per host cell from the infected population, and host cell viability. We verified the suitability of this method using two antibiotics with known activity against M. abscessus: clarithromycin and amikacin. Our analysis revealed a high degree of infection heterogeneity, which correlated with host cell size. A higher proportion of the larger host cells is infected with M. abscessus as compared to smaller host cells, and infected larger cells have higher intracellular bacterial burden than infected smaller cells. Clarithromycin treatment has a more pronounced effect on smaller host cells than on bigger host cells, suggesting that heterogeneity within the host cell population has an effect on antibiotic susceptibility of intracellular bacteria.

Visual impairment is a crippling condition affecting quality of life and depriving patients of many opportunities. It is associated with increased mortality rates directly through occurrence of adverse events such as falls and impaired emotional well-being, and indirectly through visual impairment brought upon by systemic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension (Foong et al. 2008, Fong et al. 2014, Khanna et al. 2013, Song et al.2014, Wang et al. 1999). The number of patients suffering from reversible causes of blindness is substantial. In 2010, World Health Organisation estimates that 285 million (4.25%) of the world's population is visually impaired, of which 39 million (14%) are blind. Approximately, 80% of the visual impairment is preventable. Notable causes of preventable blindness include cataracts (51%), glaucoma (8%), age-related macular degeneration (5%), corneal opacities (4%), trachoma (3%) and uncorrected refractive errors (3%) (WHO, 2015). These conditions can be easily diagnosed and treated by ophthalmologists if adequate resources are available. It is increasingly challenging for the ophthalmologists and current healthcare systems to meet the ever-expanding demands of patients with reversible causes of blindness.