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The second leading cause of death in the United States is cancer and more than one million Americans are diagnosed with cancer each year, with this number likely to increase as the population ages.

The claimed invention provides a method of detecting the presence of a parvovirus in a sample. Parvoviruses infect animals and man. In man, the only known pathogenic member of this family is parvovirus B19. The inventors have identified the parvovirus B19 receptor which provides for a method to diagnose, prevent, and treat parvovirus infection utilizing the binding affinity for the receptor.

Available for licensing and commercial development are methods for rapid and specific fluorescent staining of biological tissue samples that substantially preserve biological molecules such as mRNA. Also within the scope of the invention are methods for microdissecting tissue to obtain pure populations of cells or tissue structures based upon identifying and excising cells or tissue structures that are labeled with fluorescent specific binding agents.

This application describes an MRI probe/transmitter coil that is composed of concentric cylinders with resonant elements. The probe/transmitter can be tuned using a plurality of freely rotating resonant elements radially mounted between the two cylinders. This invention reduces the effects of subject characteristic variations on the coil resonant frequency in an MRI system. Further, this apparatus increases the sensitivity and efficiency in the magnetic resonance system by raising the Q factor of the probe coil/transmitter.

The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), Laboratory of Cardiac Energetics, has created a gel with 0.3%-0.5% carbomer 940 which is easily used as an imaging immersion medium for confocal and two photon fluorescence emission microscopy and second harmonic generation imaging. This thick, but transparent, gel can be layered on tissue for microscopic analysis and retain the connection between the objective and tissue at a large working distance without supplementary retention.

Available for licensing and commercial development are methods to optimize sequence-based assays such as microarrays, multiplexed PCR or multiplexed antibody methods. This computational method uses numerical optimization to identify an optimal probe set to be used in an assay for the measurement of a specified set of targets. The method incorporates the sequence information of the target (protein, DNA, RNA or other polymer), the assay characteristics, limits on probe set size and assay probe length in its optimization.

This invention is a novel method and apparatus for greatly improving and sustaining spontaneous breathing in patients with severe respiratory failure. Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) is widely used in the treatment of patients with mild respiratory failure.

Recently-developed protein tags enable the specific covalent attachment of synthetic ligands, incorporating fluorophores or other substituted groups, to fusion proteins containing these tags. For example, SNAP and CLIP tags bind O⁶-benzylguanine-containing and O²-benzylcytosine containing ligands respectively, which can be derivatized with a wide variety of labels, including fluorescent dyes, affinity probes, and cross-linkers.

This technology is directed to the discovery of specific microRNAs that target and downregulate enzymes within the cholesterol biosynthetic pathway and is currently being tested in vivo.

Classical X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) and radiography are based on X-ray absorption and cannot show soft tissue structures as well as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Detecting the phase delay/advance of X-rays that travel through the body could enhance soft tissue contrast 10 - 100 times. Submicron-period X-ray transmission gratings for medical x-ray energies can substantially enhance the phase detection sensitivity, but fabrication is a great challenge. This invention includes a method to fabricate multilayer transmission gratings of large areas.