Challenges in the Development of Therapy for Dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration.

Dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a multifactorial progressive degenerative disease of the retinal photoreceptors, pigmented epithelium and Bruch's membrane/choroid in central retina, causes visual impairment in millions of elderly people worldwide. The only available therapy for this disease is the over-the-counter (OTC) multi-vitamins plus macular xanthophyll (lutein/zeaxanthin) which attempts to block the damages of oxidative stress and ionizing blue light. Therefore development of dry AMD prescribed treatment is a pressing unmet medical need.

Multiplex single nucleotide extension: a robust and high throughput method for HLA-A locus typing.

This report describes a typing method that can identify all known human leukocyte antigen A (HLA-A) alleles by determining nucleotides present at polymorphic sites using single nucleotide extension. Allele specific primers are bound to capture oligonucleotides which allows for a multiplex approach during single nucleotide extension (SNE) reactions. Eleven group-specific polymerase chain reaction amplifications were performed to obtain the templates to be analyzed with sets of primers designed to investigate the polymorphisms.