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DESCRIPTION provided by applicant MicroRNAs miRNAs are involved in many diverse biological processes and a single miRNA can modulate the expression of hundreds of gene targets Changes in miRNA expression could have profound biological impacts leading to a variety of human diseases To date most miRNA expression profiling studies have relied on microarrays or high throughput RNA sequencing ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant RNA interference RNAi is a small RNA guided gene silencing process within living cells The RNAi technique is widely used in both biological research and clinical applications because it has the ability to knockdown essentially any gene of interest However one major unresolved issue in RNAi studies is non specific gene silencing It is well known that in ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant This proposal will assess the quantitative capabilities of surface enhanced Raman scattering SERS detection of cocaine and marijuana metabolites in urine samples Combining low cost instrumentation and novel chemical sensing provides an innovative new approach for diagnosing illicit drug use Current methods use a colorimetric indicator to screen specimens fo ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Pulmonary fibrosis, a group of incurable lung diseases with high mortality rates, is characterized by inflammatory cell infiltration, fibroblast proliferation, and excessive deposition of extracellular matrix proteins in lung parenchyma. Globally, five million people are affected by pulmonary fibrosis. In the U.S. alone, 200,000 suffer from this disease. Of the ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Databases of biological sequences have proven valuable for understanding the organization of human and other genomes, for unraveling the etiology of genetic disorders, and for studying medically important pathogens. Unfortunately, these databases are growing at an exponential rate, posing a severe problem for bio-sequence annotation. Specialized hardware implem ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Detection of the presence and the determination of the amount of a specific protein using various techniques utilizing antibodies specific to the target protein are one of the most important tools in biomedical research, medical diagnosis and detection of biological threat agents. These techniques (such as, for example, ELISA) take advantage of the exquisite sp ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Diabetes mellitus and related metabolic syndrome represent perhaps the fastest growing major disease market in the developing world. Diabetes has recently been described as "a global pandemic" that affects nearly 200 million people worldwide and costs this country more than $130 billion. Diabetes is a chronic disease characterized by a series of metabolic defec ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Human adenoviruses (Ads) are a significant problem in immunosuppressed humans, especially in children undergoing allogeneic stem cell transplants. About 20% of these pediatric patients develop disseminated Ad infections and about half of the patients die. There are no anti-viral drugs approved to treat these Ad infections. Cidofovir and ribavirin are used in so ...