Main Menu

This technology includes compounds that are selective agonists of the A3 receptor for the treatment of various disorders such as cancer and autoinflammatory diseases. Structurally, these compounds extend the class of (N)-methanocarba derivatives that are selective agonists of the A3 receptor.

This technology includes a new class of oligomeric molecules called thyclotides for diagnostic and therapeutic development. Thyclotides is described where chiral tetrahydrofuran (THF) diamine units are linked together with alternating glycines, and nucleobases are attached to this backbone as sidechains. The thyclotide sequence consists of a series of nucleobases similar to that of a nucleic acid sequence. Thyclotides are easily synthesized and purified with excellent solubility in water. Thyclotide sequences bind to complementary DNA and RNA sequences with very strong affinity.

This technology includes novel hyperactive Hermes Transposase mutants and their encoding genes. These transposases are easily purified in large quantity after expression in bacteria. The modified Hermes Transposases are soluble and stable and exist as smaller active complexes compared to the native enzyme. The consensus target DNA recognition sequence is the same as the native enzyme and shows minimal insertional sequence bias.

This technology includes a model for providing a patient-specific diagnosis of disease using clinical data. Specifically, the present invention relates to a fully unsupervised, machine-learned, cross-validated, and dynamic Bayesian Belief Network model that utilizes clinical parameters for determining a patient-specific probability of transplant glomerulopathy. Kidney failure is a growing problem worldwide, in part related to the increase incidence of diabetes and hypertension. Renal replacement therapy includes dialysis or renal transplantation.

This technology includes a system for automatic artifact-free measurement and visualization of tissue strain by MRI at native resolution. The investigation of regional soft tissue mechanical strain can serve as a unique indicator for different related disorders. For example, measurement of myocardial tissue during contraction can help calculate, track, and assess cardiac stress. Currently, methods such as tagging MRI (tMRI) are used for imaging soft tissue deformation. Despite being well validated, methods such as tMRI suffer from low spatial and temporal resolution.

Local inflammation processes are crucially important in the host defense against pathogens and for successful immunization because proinflammatory cytokines are necessary for initiation and propagation of an immune response. However, normal inflammatory responses are eventually terminated by physiological termination mechanisms, thereby limiting the strength and duration of immune responses, especially to weak antigens. The inventors have shown that adenosine A2a and A3a receptors play a critical role in down-regulation of inflammation in vivo.

This technology includes a versatile intravascular 3D intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) catheter that can operate under conventional X-ray and MRI for use during interventional cardiac procedures. The 3D MRICE and custom, GPU-based, real-time imaging system are also included. Structural heart disease affects more than 2.9% of the US population, and common interventional procedures can be difficult because of limitations in catheter devices and inadequate image guidance.

This technology includes a new technique to improve the fidelity of time-varying signals acquired in the dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) imaging. This technique enhances the time-varying signals in a given DCE image series through deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to learn the relationship of signal versus contrast concentration from other series of different contrast doses.

This technology includes a technique to improves detection of myocardial scar compared with conventional bright-blood late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) techniques. Dark-blood late gadolinium enhancement (DB-LGE) improves tissue delineation with signal suppression of the blood pool based on T2-preparation pulse that is relatively independent from the blood flow velocities and improves scar detection in patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease.

The invention provides identification methods for agents which inhibit the Jak-STAT signaling transduction pathway. Drugs identified by these methods are candidates for the treatment of proliferative disorders dependent on the Jak-STAT pathway, including those caused by HTLV-1. In addition, such agents may be potent immunosuppressive drugs with potential applications not only for organ transplantation but also for treatment of autoimmune diseases.