Award Data

A spacecraft thermal control system must keep the vehicle, avionics and atmosphere (if crewed) within a defined temperature range. Since water is non-toxic and good for heat transport, it is typically used as the coolant that circulates within the crew cabin boundary. This loop then interfaces with another low freeze point fluid, such as ammonia, for transport of heat to a radiator where the tempe ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Standard microfracture is a first-line, widely used and cost-effective surgical technique for repairing damaged articular cartilage, but, it is limited by decreased long-term efficacy and limited applicability in largerlesions. This leads to a burgeoning economic burden associated with primary and follow-up treatment costs, estimated at more than 40 billion dol ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Controlling mechanical signal transduction to treat osteoarthritis Abstract The TRPV4 calcium (Ca++) permeable ion channel has been shown to be expressed and functional in chondrocytes, the cells responsible for the maintenance of cartilage in weight-bearing joints. Trauma of joints with subsequent damage of cartilage, as well as chronically increased joint loa ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Patients with infective endocarditis (IE) have a poor prognosis with one third of the patients succumbing to the infection within the first year. Treatments for endocarditis involve antibiotic therapy and/or surgery that cost upwards of 100,000 per patient; however, many cases do not respond to the antibiotic treatment and surgery poses high risks. Cases of en ...

DESCRIPTION: New therapeutic agents are urgently needed for the treatment of sickle cell disease (SCD), the world's most common genetic disease. Our long-term goal is to develop a drug for use in children that prevents the inexorable progression of SCD. SCD affects approximately 100,000 people in the United States and millions worldwide. It kills more children in Africa than HIV, but while HI ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Each year in the United States over 270,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and over 40,000 will die from the disease. While multiple forms of breast cancer exist, a common theme in most of the forms involvesaberrations in signal transduction pathways that lead to inhibition of the programmed cell death process known as apoptosis. Apoptosis is a care ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Characterization of human tumor samples and cell lines in combination with inhibitor studies in animal models has established a central role for the Hh pathway in a vast array of cancer types, including small-cell lung, pancreatic, oesophageal, prostate, breast, colon, liver and ovarian cancers. Hh signaling is now implicated in approximately 20-25% of all can ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal aims to develop a novel, highly-specific targeted therapy for treatment of breast cancer. The long-term objective is to convert the proprietary intellectual property, the mouse monoclonal antibody (McAb)JAA-F11, which targets the pancarcinoma Thomsen-Friedenreich antigen (TF-Ag) to a humanized form for use as an adjunct with conventional therapy ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Breast cancer is expected to cause 39,510 deaths of American women in 2012 and 450,000 deaths globally. Once breast cancer has spread, it is essentially incurable. A critical barrier to treating advanced breast cancer is the lack of cancer-specific drugs that are effective in a large percentage of cancer patients and have low toxicity. Sixone Solutions, LLC pro ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Agave BioSystems and Professor Makoto Kuro-o at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center are proposing a collaborative effort to screen for novel small molecules acting as agonists or antagonists of the Klotho and Klotho- dependent endocrine Fibroblast Growth Factors. The expected outcome of this Phase I effort will be the validation of a high-throug ...