Many biological and clinical procedures require functional validation of a desired cell type. Current techniques to validate rely on various assays and methods, such as staining with dyes, antibodies, and nucleic acid probes, to assess stem cell health, death, proliferation, and functionality. These techniques potentially destroy stem cells and risk contaminating cells and cultures by exposing them to the environment; they are low-throughput and difficult to scale-up.

One major challenge in the development of effective cancer therapies is a lack of universal, cancer specific markers in target cells. The current standard therapies rely on surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Such procedures lead to a population of resistant cancer cells that makes further applications of chemotherapy/radiation therapy ineffective. Additionally, the systemic application of chemotherapy lacks specificity and has  off-target systemic effects that lead to adverse side effects.

This invention describes a general way to trigger the release of a bioactive small molecule from a targeting antibody. The key “trigger” is a fluorescent linker that is chemically disassembled upon irradiation with light in the near-IR range (~800 nm).

The pattern or latency connectome was hypothesized to change in physiological development and disease.  For example, in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), large diameter axons are damaged selectively – while in autism, small-diameter axons may be over-expressed. These anatomical changes are expected to alter the latency connectome or pattern of delays of information transmission between different gray matter areas involved in salient brain networks. 

The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) is a cell monolayer with specialized functions crucial to maintaining the metabolic environment and chemistry of the sub-retinal and choroidal layers in the eye. Damage or disease causing RPE cell loss leads to progressive photoreceptor damage and impaired vision. Loss of RPE is observed in many of the most prevalent cases of vision loss, including age related macular degeneration (AMD) and Best disease.

Adoptive immunotherapy is a promising new approach to cancer treatment that engineers an individual''s innate and adaptive immune system to fight against specific diseases, including cancer with fewer side-effects and more specific anti-tumor activity in individual patients. T cell receptors (TCRs) and Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CARs) are proteins that recognize antigens in the context of infected or transformed cells and activate T cells to mediate an immune response to destroy abnormal cells.

CD20 is a protein expressed by wide ranges of lymphoid malignancies originating from B cells but not by indispensable normal tissues, making it an attractive target for therapies such as T-cell receptor (TCR) therapy. Current anti-CD20 therapeutics face a number of limitations. The most important limitation to current anti-CD20 therapies include cancer cells becoming resistant to the therapy.

B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (B-CLL) is a cancer characterized by a progressive accumulation of functionally incompetent lymphocytes.  Despite high morbidity and mortality, the only available potential cure is allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (alloHSCST).  However, there is less than a 50% chance of finding a matching bone marrow or blood donor for B-CLL patients.  Other clinically tested targeted therapies such as rituximab and alemtuzumab target both malignant and normal B cells, resulting in immunosuppression.

The use of tumor transcriptomics for precision oncology has made significant advances, mainly by identifying cancer driver genes or actionable mutations for treatment with targeted therapies.  However, this strategy misses out on broader genetic interactions that could reveal additional biologically testable biomarkers for therapy response prediction and inform the selection of more effective drugs for targeted treatment.

Primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL) is an aggressive type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that mostly occurs in people between the ages of 30-40. It accounts for 5-7% of all aggressive lymphomas. The diagnosis of PMBCL is challenging as the histological features of PMBCL overlap with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), another most common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Available evidence suggests that PMBCL responds much more favorably to the DA-EPOCH-R chemotherapy regimen than to the standard R-CHOP regimen used to treat DLBCL.