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Counterfeit drugs (also known as “fake or falsified medicines”) have become a major world-wide public health concern. Falsified medicines may contain toxic substances, the wrong active ingredients, suboptimal amounts of active ingredients, or no active ingredients at all. CDC researchers developed a portable (handheld), battery-operated, and relatively inexpensive device that non-trained personnel can use quickly to evaluate a particular branded tablet for authenticity.

Micro-Screen is a CDC developed software program designed to capture images and archive and display a compiled image(s) from a portion of a microscope slide in real time. This program allows for the re-creation of larger images that are constructed from individual microscopic fields captured in up to five focal planes and two magnifications. This program may be especially useful for the creation of data archives for diagnostic and teaching purposes and for tracking histological changes during disease progression.

CDC researchers have isolated and characterized the novel primate T-lymphotropic viruses denoted human T-lymphotropic viruses 3 and 4 (HTLV-3 and HTLV4), that are believed to have resulted from cross-species transmission at some point in the past. It has been previously established that HTLV-1 causes adult T cell leukemia and other inflammatory diseases; HTLV-2 is considered less pathogenic than HTLV-1 and has been associated with a neurologic disease similar to HTLV-1-associated myelopathy.

One of the problems with the development of current therapies for HIV infection is that the virus rapidly develops resistance to drugs such as reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors.

This CDC-developed technology relates to novel vaccines or boosters directed against pulmonary tuberculosis. There is currently only a single vaccine against tuberculosis, the (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) BCG vaccine. Reports suggest widely variable effectiveness for the BCG vaccine and that BCG administration has very limited success against prevention of the primary pulmonary form of the disease.

This invention provides materials, methods, and assays for detecting HIV-1 groups M and O and optionally HIV-1 group N and simian immunodeficiency virus-cpz (SIV-cpz). Specific nucleic acid primers for hybridization, amplification, and detection of HIV-1 are also provided for. The nucleic acid amplification assays can detect small concentrations of HIV-1 and are also useful for quantitative examinations of viral load concentrations within biological samples.

This novel assay features real-time PCR reagents and methods for detecting drug-resistance related mutations in HIV, for newly diagnosed patients and those individuals currently receiving antiretroviral therapies. As the use of antiretroviral compounds to treat HIV infection proliferates, viruses adapt and evolve mutations limiting the efficacy of these drugs and disrupting the success of treatment.

Homocystinuria (HCU), a group of inherited disorders, causes symptoms ranging from failure to thrive and developmental delays in infants or young children to abnormal blood clots with onset in adults.1 Approximately 1 in 200,000 to 335,000 people have HCU globally.2

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.