Abstract: Inhibitors of glucosidase, especially those related to castanospermine, are effective in preventing or ameliorating conditions such as liver damage and emphysema that are present in individuals who produce a mutant form of antitrypsin, &agr;1-ATZ. Also effective in the method of the invention are imino sugars and their reduced forms in general as well as phenylbutyric acid. These compounds enhance the secretion of the mutant form, which retains substantial biological activity, and do not impair its degradation in the endoplasmic reticulum.

Abstract: A methodology and concomitant system for three-dimensional near-field microscopy achieves subwavelength resolution of an object without retrieval of the optical phase. The features of this approach are three-fold: (i) the near-field phase problem is circumvented by employing measurements of the power extinguished from probe fields; (ii) the fields on which the power measurements are performed may be monitored far from the object and thus subwavelength resolution is obtained from far zone measurements; and (iii) by developing an analytic approach to the inverse problem in the form of an explicit inversion formula, an image reconstruction algorithm is produced which is strikingly robust in the presence of noise.

Abstract: An immortalized epithelial lens cell line obtained from human lens epithelial cells infected with hybride adenovirus/SV40 (Ad12-SV40), and methods for making and using the cell line are disclosed.