Award Data

Terrorist use of radioactive nuclear materials via nuclear and/or radiological dispersion devices (dirty bombs) is a serious threat. Therefore, it is critical to detect the proliferation of nuclear material. Critical challenges facing this objective include: (a) high sensitivity detection of signature emissions (e.g., gamma rays) from common radioactive isotopes behind shielding, and (b) cost-effe ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant Crystallization followed by subsequent structure determination is a major step in understanding the structure function relationship of macromolecules Understanding macromolecule structure has become a key part in the development of new pharmaceuticals and is a major area of NIH research Crystallization however is also the rate limiting step despite techno ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant MicroRNAs miRNAs are involved in many diverse biological processes and a single miRNA can modulate the expression of hundreds of gene targets Changes in miRNA expression could have profound biological impacts leading to a variety of human diseases To date most miRNA expression profiling studies have relied on microarrays or high throughput RNA sequencing ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant RNA interference RNAi is a small RNA guided gene silencing process within living cells The RNAi technique is widely used in both biological research and clinical applications because it has the ability to knockdown essentially any gene of interest However one major unresolved issue in RNAi studies is non specific gene silencing It is well known that in ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant The increasing output of new integral membrane protein IMP structures is partially due to the availability of an increasing number of chemical variables such as detergents detergent like molecules lipids and solubilizing stabilizing additives It is clear that specific combinations and concentrations of these different variables are often necessary to impr ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Reliable diagnostic differentiation between acute and chronic myocardial infarcts would be of great benefit for cardiac surgeons and interventional cardiologists. Such differentiation could be used to make decisions about which vessels and in what order would be reopened or bypassed. MRI is an intrinsically noninvasive diagnostic tool and the Delayed Enhancemen ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long term goal of this project is to establish the usefulness of a new infarct-avid, persistent contrast agent (PCA), Gd(ABE-DTTA), which due to its long lifetime in tissue allows construction of accurate relaxation-rate-enhancement(AR1)-based voxel-by-voxel viability maps of the acutely infarcted heart. Assisted by the slow tissue kinetics and infarct-spec ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Highly multiplexed detection of biological molecules and their activities has been an essential element of modern molecular diagnosis, drug development and research in genomics and proteomics. Well established DNA array methodologies exist which permit highly multiplexed detection of transcripts. Similar methodologies for detecting or measuring activities of pr ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A number of characteristics of the Adenovirus type 5 (Ad5) make it an optimal gene therapy/virotherapy vector suitable for a wide array of cancer therapeutic approaches. Despite these advantages, overall ifficacy remains limited by sub-optimal adenovirus delivery to cancer tissues. One conceptual approach to overcome this limitation is to achieve an amplificati ...