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The National Cancer Institute's Protein Expression Laboratory seeks parties interested in licensing the novel delivery of RNA to mammalian cells using virus-like particles.

Current treatments for cancer and viral infection are limited remedies that often suppress cell or viral replication rather than eliminate diseased cells entirely from the body. A further limitation is that these therapies often compromise healthy cells as well, leaving problems of recurrence and side effects.

Researchers at developed a novel therapeutic nanoparticle (NP) system harboring therapeutic small siRNA that can significantly enhance effectiveness and specificity of treatments by killing diseased cells.

Available for commercial development is software that provides automatic visualization of features inside biological image volumes in 3D. The software provides a simple and interactive visualization for the exploration of biological datasets through dataset-specific transfer functions and direct volume rendering. The method employs a K-Means++ clustering algorithm to classify a two-dimensional histogram created from the input volume. The classification process utilizes spatial and data properties from the volume.

Exposure to ionizing radiation or agents that induce DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs), which is one of the most damaging types of lesions in DNA, can result in damage to cells and/or tissues.  Thiscan lead to illness (i.e., Acute Radiation Syndrome, Cancer) or death.  Identifying the amount of exposure to a DNA DSB-causing agent can be useful in determining the need for further testing, avoidance or modification of certain medical procedures, and/or types of medical treatments.

Current methods to deliver proteins into cells (e.g., using retrovirus, DNA transfection, protein transduction, microinjection, complexing the protein with lipids, etc.) have many shortcomings, such as lack of target specificity toxicity, or unwanted random integration into the host chromosome.  Protein transduction is an emerging technology for delivering proteins into cells by exploiting the ability of certain proteins to penetrate the cell membrane.  However, the majority of the proteins delivered by this means are usually trapped and subsequently degraded in the endosomes-lyso

The subject invention describes a new class of compounds (such as peptides or mimetics) that target viral RNAs and inhibit the viral life cycle by blocking the viral recognition process. More specifically, these compounds are the first against an RNA Target - currently there are no clinical drugs against RNA targets in the treatment of any type of human disease.

The National Cancer Institute’s Protein Expression Laboratory seeks parties to co-develop dual luminescent/fluorescent cancer biomarkers.

In research settings, visualization of  tumors or tumor cells is often done using either bioluminescence or fluorescence.  However, both of these methods have shortcomings: bioluminescence is not sensitive enough to sort individual tumor cells, and fluorescence cannot be used effectively to view internal tumors and is best used with surface tumors.

Molecular imaging is a disease-specific targeting modality that promises much more accurate diagnoses of serious diseases such as cancer and infections. Agents are being continually developed with a view to clinical translation, with several such therapies requiring measurement of very small doses. Currently, there is no way of accurately measuring small amounts of radioactivity used in many pre-clinical tracer studies, as on-the-market commercial dose calibrators measure at too high a dose range, typically at 10-1000 µCi and higher.

Mesothelin (MSLN) is an antigen highly expressed in several human cancers including mesotheliomas, ovarian cancers and pancreatic cancers. As such, human MSLN (hMSLN) is a target for many anti-cancer drugs. Most therapeutics targeting hMSLN do not recognize the mouse isoform of MSLN (mMSLN) and therefore cannot be tested in mouse cancer models. 

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have developed orthotopic allograft models for pancreatic cancer that utilize low passage primary pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells or tumor fragments implanted into the cancer-free pancreata of recipient syngeneic immunocompetent mice. Tumor development in these models is more synchronized, latency is substantially shortened, and tumors develop only in one location, as pre-determined by the choice of a site for cells/tumor fragment implantation.