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The invention discloses a vaccine which comprises lipooligosaccharide (LOS) isolated from N. meningitidis and conjugated to a carrier protein. The invention also discloses a method of making the acellular vaccine. The method consists of two main steps. In the first step the lipooligosaccharide (LOS), chosen so it does not contain the lacto-N-neotetraose human antigen (LNnT), is detoxified by a novel procedure which uses hydrazine to remove the O-linked fatty acids. In the second step, the detoxified LOS (dLOS) is covalently conjugated to a carrier protein such as Tetanus Toxoid (TT).

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) chronically infects over 300 million people worldwide. Many of them will die of chronic hepatitis or hepatocellular carcinoma. The present technology relates to the isolation and characterization of a novel neutralizing chimpanzee monoclonal antibody to HBV. The antibody was identified through a combinatorial antibody library constructed from bone marrow cells of a chimpanzee experimentally infected with HBV. The selected monoclonal antibody has been shown to react equally well with wild-type HBV and the most common neutralization escape mutant variants.

Available for licensing and commercial development is a method of inhibiting SARS-CoV replication, propagation and transmission using 2-cyano-3,12-dioxooleana-1,9-dien-28-oic (CDDO). Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is an infectious atypical pneumonia that has recently been recognized in patients in 32 countries and regions. The atypical pneumonia with unknown etiology was initially observed in Guangdong Province, China.

This application describes a composition and method for treating inflammatory bowel disease or other autoimmune diseases. The composition utilizes a vector which contains a first promoter which controls the expression of a regulatory transcription factor and a second inducible promoter which controls the expression of the gene of interest. The preferred gene of interest encodes an isoform of TGF-beta such as TGF-beta₁ or TGF-beta₃. The isoform of TGF-beta does not have to be hTGF-beta and can be a latent or active isoform of TGF-beta.

The invention provides a method of diagnosing X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (XSCID) in males or determining whether females are carriers. This method is based upon the presence of either a mutated or truncated IL-2Rgamma gene. The invention also discloses a method of treating XSCID as well as a method for monitoring the therapy.

Available for licensing are new methods of rapidly treating depression. The drugs currently used to treat depression work by increasing the activity at serotonin, norepinephrine and perhaps dopamine receptors in the CNS. However these drugs are effective in only 60-70% of patients, require 3-4 weeks of treatment before clinical improvement and have many side effects. These inventors have shown that in human patients, the administration of anti-muscarinic agents produces a rapid, prolonged alleviation of depressive symptoms.

The complexity of taste discrimination (salty, sour, sweet, umami and bitter) varies between human individuals and populations. Sweet and umami (the taste of glutamate) tastes play a major role in the perception of calorically-rich and essential nutrients and there are well-documented differences in individual perception of sweet and umami flavorings, many of which appear to be genetic in origin.

This invention relates to a novel magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) method that accomplishes uniform contrast enhancement between coronary arteries and the surrounding tissue across the entire imaging volume. The disclosed technique utilizes an adiabatic refocusing transverse relaxation time (T₂)-preparation pulse sequence, in which the magnetization is tipped into the transverse plane with a hard radio-frequency (RF) pulse and refocused using a pair of adiabatic fast-passage RF pulses. The isochromats are subsequently returned to the longitudinal axis using a hard RF pulse.

Transformation-Associated Recombination (TAR) cloning in yeast is a unique method for selective isolation of large chromosomal fragments or entire genes from complex genomes without the time-consuming step of library construction.¹ The technique involves homologous recombination during yeast spheroplast transformation between genomic DNA and a TAR vector that has short (approximately 60bp) 5’ and 3’ gene targeting sequences (hooks).

Cytokines exert their respective biochemical and physiological effects by binding to specific receptor molecules, which then stimulate signal transduction pathways. Interleukin-21 (IL-21) is a type I cytokine whose receptor is expressed on T, B, and NK cells.