Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) is probably the most ubiquitous microbial pathogen in the world today infecting one-third of the total population and causing millions of active tuberculosis (TB) cases each year. The economic costs are substantial and more than one million people die of TB infections each year. Before the arrival of antimicrobial therapy, TB wa ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The primary goal of the Phase I effort is to establish the feasibility of fabricating waveguides to realize a significant, (10 fold), increase in performance in the output power of a picosecond pulsed green laser without increasing the peak pump power. The ultimate goal is to develop a fiber pigtailed, compact, cost-effective 530 nm picosecond laser producing 1 ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The immediate objective of our research is to generate a method that will enable researchers to multiplex Chromatin ImmunoPreciptation-Sequencing (ChIP-Seq) analysis in a single Next generation DNA sequencing run. In the to-be-developed method: i) a set of antibodies directed against specific DNA-binding proteins are uniquely bar-coded with a DNA 'ZipCode;' ii) ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The specific goal of this proposal is to develop a high-throughput method to identify scFv antibodies that recognize post-translationally modified proteins. We propose to complete a proof-of-concept for a new type of affinity screening process based on emulsion, secretion, and capture, which we term ESCape . In the proposed phage ESCape method, E. coli transfo ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is a proposal to establish a proof-of-principle for a vector system to isolate high-affinty antibodies through selective rounds in both yeast and Escherichia coli. Antibodies have quickly become extremely useful as therapeutic medicines to treat a wide-variety of disorders. We propose to develop a means of making the discovery of immunotherapeutics faster ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to produce novel synthetic malaria vaccines based on epitopes of the circumsporozoite (CS) protein of Plasmodium falciparum, the causative agent of human malaria. Malaria is one of the major diseases in the developing world, causing 200-500 million new infections and over 1 million deaths each year, primarily in young children in Af ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Phase I project will test the idea that mechanostress-sensitive, fluorescent polymers can detect structural changes induced in proteins following reaction of the protein with small molecule inhibitors. This concept will be tested and proven using recombinant acetylcholinesterase (AChE) an enzyme that is known to undergo catastrophic denaturation when it re ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is a proposal to test the feasibility of using triplex-forming oligonucleotides to correct the sickle cell disease (SCD) mutation in human CD34+ cells. SCD is one of the most common human genetic diseases and is the result of one specific inherited mutation in the 2-globin gene. Hydroxyurea is currently the only FDA-approved treatment for SCD. Both support ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Lyme disease, due to infection with the Ixodes tick-transmitted spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States, with over 20,000 cases reported to the CDC annually. There is controversy over the length of antibiotic therapy that is necessary to achieve a clinical cure for Lyme disease. Serologic tests (ELISA and im ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Despite the fact that tuberculosis is a major public global health problem, there have been no drugs developed for it since the 1960s. In 2006 tuberculosis caused 1.7 million deaths annually with approximately 8 million new cases emerging annually. Tuberculosis has been exacerbated by human immunodeficiency virus pandemic with over 50% of deaths among the HIV-i ...