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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.

Researchers at the NCI  Laboratory of Molecular Theranostics and the Molecular Imaging Program have developed a new method to modify, isolate and remove a single chemically-labeled molecule or a cluster of proteins associated with the chemically-labeled protein. The chemical label can be an antigen-antibody complex. This discovery is based on the mechanism of photo-immunotherapy (PIT).

This technology from the NCI Molecular Imaging Program relates to a Zirconium-89 (89Zr)-oxine complex for cell labeling, tracking of labeled cells by whole-body positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) imaging, and associated methods. A long half-life of 89Zr (78.4 hours), high sensitivity of PET, and absence of background signal in the recipient enable tracking cells over a week using low levels of labeling radioactivity without causing cellular toxicity.

Cytidine analogs remain an area of active drug discovery and development, with five FDA approved drugs for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Two of these drugs, azacitidine (Vidaza®) and decitabine (Dacogen®), which were approved for myelodysplastic syndromes in 2004 and 2006, respectively, inhibit the DNA maintenance methyltransferase DNMT1. Because of the general toxicity of azacitidines, other nucleoside analogs are favored as therapeutics.

Accurate measurement of low metabolite concentrations produced by medically important enzymes is commonly obscured by noise during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Measuring the turnover rate of low-level metabolites can directly quantify the activity of enzymes of interest, including possible drug targets in cancer and other diseases. Noise can cause the in vivo signal to fall below the limit of detection. A variety of denoising methods have been proposed to enhance spectroscopic peaks, but still fall short for the detection of low-intensity signals.

Over the past decades, taxanes such as paclitaxel and docetaxel have emerged as effective chemotherapy agents for breast cancer and other malignancies. Taxanes are effective in many patients, however, not all patients benefit from this type of chemotherapy. A significant need remains for a means of predicting clinical outcome from taxane-based chemotherapy.

This invention pertains to a system for continuous observation of rodents in home-cage environments with the specific aim to facilitate the quantification of activity levels and behavioral patterns for mice housed in a commercial ventilated cage rack.  The home-cage in-rack provides daytime and nighttime monitoring with the stability and consistency of a home cage environment.

Despite four decades of intensive research, a safe and effective HIV-1 vaccine remains elusive due to the extreme difficulty in eliciting broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs), which recognize and block HIV-1 from entering healthy cells. Only rare natural HIV-1 envelopes (Envs) promote the activation and expansion of naive B cells expressing unmutated germline antibodies of various bNAb lineages, but they typically do so for a single lineage for the same neutralization site.

Summary: 

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) seeks licensees for a machine learning algorithm that scores epitopes for likelihood of reactivity in order to create personalized effective immunotherapy.

Description of Technology: