Award Data

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 (provided by applicant): In the last decade, Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as one of the most highly antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the United States (US) and throughout the world. These infections are increasingly prevalent and highlylethal, killing 50-60% of those infected. Worse, strains of A. baumannii that no known antibiotic will kill have now emerged, and will continue ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Up to 170 million people worldwide are chronically infected with HCV Hepatitis C virus (HCV) putting the infected individuals at significant risk for cirrhosis, liver failure and liver cancer. End- stage liver diseasecaused by HCV is the leading indication of liver transplantation (LT) in the United States. However, reinfection with HCV occurs universally and ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Despite advances in the development of HIV drugs there remains a need for new therapies. Toxicities associated with long term use of many of the approved HIV drugs coupled with the development of resistance drives the need for new and novel antivirals. Maturation inhibitors (MIs) represent one such class of HIV therapies. HIV maturation inhibitors block virus r ...

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): CD47 has emerged as a novel therapeutic target in hematologic cancers. Leukemias expressing the highest levels of CD47 have the worst prognosis. Increased CD47 expression is thought to protect cancer cells from phagocytic clearance by sending a don't eat me signal to macrophages via SIRPa, an inhibitory receptor that prevents phagocytosis of CD47-bearing ...