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The National Cancer Institute seeks interested parties to co-develop transgenic mice having immunocompetent rat growth hormone-firefly Luciferase-enhanced green fluorescent protein.

Studies have shown that Tissue Inhibitor of Metalloproteinases 2 (TIMP-2) suppresses tumor growth and tumor-associated angiogenesis. Currently, the main obstacle in using TIMP-2 as a biologic therapeutic has been the inability to produce sufficient quantities of the protein for testing and development. 

Cancer diagnosis depends on the assessment of patient biopsies to determine tumor type, grading, and stage of malignancy. Pathologists visually review specimens and count mitotic figures (MF) in a variety of cancer types to help gauge aggressiveness, guide treatment, and inform patient prognosis. Current technology for recording MF counts in surgical pathology is lacking in objectivity, and enumeration of MF by microscopy can be error prone. In particular, a lack of systematic means for recording contributes to recognized variability.

The invention listed below is owned by an agency of the U.S. Government and is available for licensing and/or co-development in the U.S. in accordance with 35 U.S.C. 209 and 37 CFR part 404 to achieve expeditious commercialization of results of federally-funded research and development.

Cancer stem cells are a minority population of cells in tumors that initiate and sustain the cancer and which are resistant to therapy; they may cause tumors to recur after curative treatment.  Current therapies generally do not target cancer stem cells.

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.

The proto-oncogene c-Myc is deregulated and overexpressed in ~70% of all cancers. Thus, c-Myc is an attractive therapeutic target since disrupting c-Myc activity could be used as pan-chemotherapy. Beyond cancer, Myc is also a positive effector of tissue inflammation, and its function has been implicated in the pathophysiology of heart failure. Because c-Myc is a transcription factor, a rationally designed small molecule targeting c-Myc would be required to exhibit significant specificity.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute’s Biopharmaceutical Development Program recently developed massively parallel sequencing methods for virus-derived therapeutics such as viral vaccines and oncolytic immunotherapies.

Gene therapy research has yielded FDA-approved treatments for an array of diseases. However, challenges facing nucleic-acid based therapeutics include non-specific delivery and degradation of the nanoparticles. NCI investigators have developed a solution to address these challenges in their novel nucleic-based therapy based on the conditional activation strategy. 

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have developed a method of stimulating an immune response in humans at risk for infection by, or already infected with, an Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)-1 retrovirus. This method utilizes deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) vaccines to stimulate CD8+ T cell immune responses. The DNA vaccine encodes antigens known to be effective against retroviruses, such as HIV-1gag, gp120, nefCTL, and proCTL. The same antigens are also expressed by the pox virus vaccine, which elicits an increased immune response when combined with the DNA vaccine.