Research Project
3501777
The long term objective of this project is to develop a simple, specific, and rapid immunodiagnostic test to measure the amount of Hemoglobin A1c in human erythrocytes. The test will be an ELISA construct that employs a monoclonal antibody that specifically recognizes Hemoglobin A1c, an index of the ambient blood glucose concentrations over the periodic assessment of the prevailing blood glucose level is essential to establishing and maintaining control of diabetes, and that control of diabetes is important in arresting the development of complications of diabetes. The mainstay of monitoring diabetic control is measurement of the blood glucose concentration and of the extent to which certain circulating proteins have become nonenzymatically glycated. Hemoglobin A1c and Glycohemoglobin measurements are widely used as a means to objectively evaluate ambient glucose control over 2-3 month periods. However, current methods for measuring Glycohemoglobin and/or Hemoglobin A1c are time-consuming, cumbersome, non-specific, and have unacceptable coefficients of variation. It has been appreciated that these problems could be surmounted if a monoclonal antibody that reacts only with Hemoglobin A1c are available, but numerous attempts in several laboratories to create such an antibody have been unsuccessful. This project will exploit our success in creating a unique and highly specific monoclonal antibody that recognizes the success in creating a unique and highly specific monoclonal antibody that recognizes the N-terminal glycated epitopes residing in Hemoglobin A1c but not in other proteins and that does not react with (unglycated) Hemoglobin Ao, and will utilize this antibody to develop a reliable and specific immunodiagnostic method to quantitate Hemoglobin A1c in human blood. GRANt=R43HL44776 Use of the Imatron C-100 CT scanner to measure myocardial blood flow would provide cardiologists with a diagnostic tool which is faster, less invasive, less expensive, and has better resolution than currently available studies (thallium and PET.) There are already 24 Imatron scanners in use worldwide. This grant proposes to develop a myocardial blood flow workstation for use with the Imatron scanner. The workstation will receive image data from the scanner then proceed with the analysis independently. It will facilitate the clinical use of the scanner for blood flow studies by largely automating the analysis steps. These steps include: image processing to improve scan quality, automatic registration of scans, automatic detection and elimination of problematic scans, creation of normalized, color encoded flow images which can be viewed in a cine sequence, and creation of a color encoded flow functional image. In addition there will be region of interest and gamma variate curve fit analysis tools. In Phase I the software will be developed and tested using already available C-100 scan sequences. A group of clinical cardiologists will review the functionality and applicability of the analysis package. In Phase II clinical testing will commence and the results will be compared to existing studies.
