Antibodies to TMC1 Protein for Hearing Loss

This technology includes antibodies for TMC1 protein as a treatment for hearing loss. TMC1 is one of the common genes causing hereditary hearing loss. Our laboratory used synthetic peptides corresponding to the TMC1 protein to immunize rabbits. The resulting antisera were shown to bind to TMC1 protein expressed in heterologous expression systems. TMC1 protein is required for the transduction of sound into electrical impulses in inner ear sensory cells.

Monoclonal Antibodies That Bind to the Underside of Influenza Viral Neuraminidase

Current influenza vaccines mainly induce antibodies against the surface glycoprotein hemagglutinin (HA) that block viral attachment to its host receptors and viral membrane fusion to the host cell. The immunodominant head region of HA undergoes antigenic drift and antibodies directed to the head confer little cross-protections between strains or subtypes.

Neutralizing Antibodies to Influenza HA and Their Use and Identification

The effectiveness of current influenza vaccines varies by strain and season, in part because influenza viruses continuously evolve to evade human immune responses. While the majority of seasonal influenza infections cause relatively mild symptoms, each year influenza virus infections result in over 500,000 hospitalizations in the United States and Europe. Current standard of care for individuals hospitalized with uncomplicated influenza infection is administration of neuraminidase inhibitors.

Small Molecule Inhibitors of Lactate Dehydrogenase as an Anti-Cancer Therapy

This technology includes a novel pyrazole-based compound NCGC00274266 (MLS000714501) that inhibits LDH-A with an IC50 of approximately 20 µM with low efficacy that can be used as an anti-cancer therapeutic. Structure-activity relationship studies on this compound led to hydroxypryazole-based compounds and discovery that the hydroxypyrazole compound and related analogs demonstrated a strong metal-dependent activity.

Efficacious Fluorinated Cytidine Analog Cancer Therapeutic With Low Toxicity In Animal Studies

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.

Monoclonal Antibodies to Fentanyl Analogs for Research, Therapeutics, and Novel Diagnostics

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as an analgesic (pain relief) and anesthetic. However, synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, are prone to abuse and are the primary drivers of overdose related deaths in the United States. As little as two milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal. Furthermore, structural variants of fentanyl, often mixed with other drugs or counterfeit pills are illegally distributed without the user’s knowledge.

Dual-Germline Antibody Engager Chimeric HIV–1 Immunogens

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.

Novel One-Well Limiting-Antigen Avidity Enzyme Immunoassay to Detect Recent HIV-1 Infection Using a Multi-subtype Recombinant Protein

This CDC developed Limiting-Antigen avidity Enzyme Immunoassay (LAg-avidity-EIA) provides an easy way to measure increasing binding strength (avidity) of HIV antibodies as part of maturation HIV antibodies after seroconversion, providing a method to distinguish early-stage from long-term HIV-1 infection. Surveillance of HIV-1 provides information on prevalence rates of the disease, but determination of new infection rates (HIV-1 incidence) is difficult to deduce. Longitudinal follow up is expensive and can be biased.