Award Data

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant Leptospirosis a zoonotic disease is an important public health problem worldwide It is caused by spirochete bacteria belonging to nine species and more than serovars of the genus Leptospira In the US there is increasing awareness of the importance of leptospirosis as the cause of disease among inner city populations military personnel and individuals ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant This proposal seeks to develop a novel vaccine against Lyme disease by targeting Ixodes scapularis proteins critical for Borrelia burgdorferi transmission from the tick to mammalian host Earlier work has identified four tick proteins Salp TRE tHRF and TSLPI that facilitate different steps of spirochete transmission and immunity against these protein ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant One of the challenges of research in infectious diseases is to find ways to use the increasing knowledge of the mechanisms underlying disease transformation and progression to develop novel therapeutic strategies for diseases such as increasing menace of bacterial infections Targeting specific RNA such as rRNA which are involved in proliferation and survival ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The major barriers limiting the application of MRI to detect small liver lesions and metastasis at the early stage and patient selection for targeted therapy based on molecular imaging of disease biomarkers, are due tothe lack of desired MRI contrast agents capable of enhancing the contrast between normal liver tissues and tumors with high relaxivity, tumor tar ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our goal is to create a compact, affordable, fully automated, screening system for large-scale drug 2 testing in living small animal disease models (e.g., worms, flies, and fish). Modern drug discovery is 3 driven by high-throughput screening (HTS) systems that have the capacity to evaluate large chemical 4 compound 'libraries'. The majority of hits ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the United States with some sub-types remaining essentially untreatable, expansion of available drug targets will provide significant new options for the development ofmore effective antineoplastic agents. The major goal of this project is to apply a unique drug discovery strategy to cancer drug development. Th ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder. One of the few drugs used to treat AD is memantine, which inhibits N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors (NMDARs), glutamate receptor subtypes found at nearly all vertebrate excitatory synapses. NMDARs are critically involved in many aspects of nervous system function, including learning and me ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Site-specific binding of proteins to DNA plays an important role in cell development, cell signaling, the cell cycle, and diseases such as cancer. There are two overarching goals to this proposal: (1) to develop a meansfor the identification of proteins bound to specific DNA sequences, and (2) to develop a better method for the identification of immunoprecipita ...

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): NMR is probably the most powerful and widely used analytical technique for structure determination and function elucidation of molecules of all types, but it suffers from low sensitivity, particularly for insoluble biological macromolecules. Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) with Magic Angle Spinning (MAS) has recently demonstrated S/N gains exceeding t ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A flexible, protein-based, ion-mediated retinal implant is proposed for the restoration of vision for patients with retinal degenerative diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa(RP). The implant under development uses the retinal- containing protein, bacteriorhodopsin (BR), to convert light into a pH gradient. This gradi ...