Vector-borne diseases caused by arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) are a considerable challenge to public health globally. Mosquito-borne arboviruses, such as Chikungunya, Dengue, and Zika viruses, cause a range of human illnesses and may be fatal. Currently, efforts to control these diseases still face challenges due to growing vector resistance towards insecticides, urbanization, and limited effective antiviral treatments and vaccines. Animal models are crucial in antiviral research on mosquito-borne arboviruses, playing a role in understanding disease mechanisms, vaccine development, and toxicity testing, but the application of animal models still faces the challenges of ethical considerations and animal-to-human translational success. Genetically engineered mouse models, hamster models and non-human primate (NHP) are currently used in arbovirus research, but new models such as tree shrews and novel humanized mice are emerging. In the context of Malaysian research, the use of long-tailed macaques as potential NHP models for arbovirus research is possible; however, it faces the ethical dilemma of using an endangered species for scientific purposes. Overall, animal models play a crucial role in advancing infectious disease research, but a balance between medical research and species conservation must be upheld.
The realization of operationally stable blue organic light-emitting diodes is a challenging issue across the field. While device optimization has been a focus to effectively prolong device lifetime, strategies based on molecular engineering of chemical structures, particularly at the subatomic level, remains little. Herein, we explore the effect of targeted deuteration on donor and/or acceptor units of thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitters and investigate the structure-property relationship between intrinsic molecular stability, based on isotopic effect, and device operational stability. We show that the deuteration of the acceptor unit is critical to enhance the photostability of thermally activated delayed fluorescence compounds and hence device lifetime in addition to that of the donor units, which is commonly neglected due to the limited availability and synthetic complexity of deuterated acceptors. Based on these isotopic analogues, we observe a gradual increase in the device operational stability and achieve the long-lifetime time to 90% of the initial luminance of 23.4 h at the luminance of 1000 cd m-2 for thermally activated delayed fluorescence-sensitized organic light-emitting diodes. We anticipate our strategic deuteration approach provides insights and demonstrates the importance on structural modification materials at a subatomic level towards prolonging the device operational stability.